RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at the Barbican review: hits hard right from the start →

Simryn Gill & Diana Thater | the Evening Standard

Fern Shaffer, Nine Year Ritual of Healing - 9 April, 1998, 1998

By Ben Luke

This important and timely exhibition about ecofeminism and art across several decades, gathers 50 international women and gender-nonconforming artists who explore the links between the oppression of women and environmental collapse. An exhibition titled RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology undoubtedly risks preaching only to the choir, but that would be a shame. It is both ambitious and admirable, if uneven in places.

Mostly through film and photography, it treats the climate emergency as systemic and intersectional; connected to widespread abuses of power relating to the extractive impulses of colonialism and capitalism, to racism and the exploitation of indigenous communities. Organised thematically, it has distinctive focuses within this vast subject, from the effects of industrial extractivism, to histories of protest and artists’ reimaginings of the connection beneath the Earth and womanhood.

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Anonymous Was a Woman and New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Announce 2023 Environmental Art Grants Recipients

Diana Thater | NYFA Awards

Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists from the United States and U.S. territories. In the 2023 cycle, the second year of the program, a total of $309,000 in grant funding was awarded to 20 projects that will focus on environmental issues and advocacy in locations including Belize, Southern Iraq, Mongolia, New York, Pennsylvania, Tierra del Fuego, West Virginia, and Washington. The 20 projects were selected from 884 applications from artists who reside in the United States and U.S. Territories.

Avant L'Orage at The Pinault Collection →

Diana Thater | Pinault Collection

(c) Les Graphiquants

Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, in the urgency of the present, before the storm breaks again, the artists in the exhibition invent unusual ecosystems that contain new seasons.

Whereas ancestral calendars were conditioned by cosmic movements, our frantic race for progress and abundance has irrevocably transformed our environment. Its disruption forces us to adapt in turn. Formerly the granary of Paris, the Bourse de Commerce building has been both a witness to and an agent in the global acceleration of predatory trade since 1889, resulting from colonisation and the intensive exploitation of the planet’s resources. The building embodies this new, desynchronised cycle of time. In the iron, glass, stone, and concrete architecture of the Bourse de Commerce, which could be that of a greenhouse, a series of fleeting and contradictory temporalities appear, including the landscape imagined by Danh Vo for the Rotunda.

In the other spaces, a display from the Pinault Collection supports this birth of a new cycle of seasons in the making, of mutating ecosystems, of micro-territories in gestation, bathed in a light approaching a mutating climatic dusk. Hicham Berrada’s Présage, which immerses the visitor in a landscape in the throes of transformation, makes us aware of the beauty of a world without us. Diana Thater’s Chernobyl takes us into an irradiated landscape, an apocalyptic theatre, while Pierre Huyghe’s film follows the movements of a monkey wearing a human mask, abandoned in the outskirts of Fukushima. Robert Gober’s Waterfall depicts a trompe l’oeil nature from which we are irretrievably separated, while Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (a play on the words “untitled” and “uncultivated”) recreates the world as experienced by non-humans, from dogs to insects, in a compost committed to new possibilities for fertilising the world.

Exhibition runs from 8 February to 11 September 2023.

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The Conversation →

Diana Thater | ART[MEMO] Magazine

By D. Edward Martin

“Beyond the fun, however, there are layers of meaning to unpack and to contemplate. For example, the conversation between human and animal is one that is fraught with difficulty. We speak for animals, and we talk over them. A conversation implies two or more parties that are equal in some way, and this conversation is held back by those who believe that between human and animal there is (to borrow a phrase from Jane Goodall) a difference of kind, and not simply one of degree. Additionally, the idea that nature is somehow “out there” and not surrounding us at every moment—whether in a gallery, at home, or in the outdoors—erects barriers to sympathy as well.”

Diana Thater: The Conversation at 1301PE →

Diana Thater | Art and Cake

Installation view, Diana Thater, The Conversation, 2021. 1301PE Los Angeles. Photography by Fredrik Nilsen.

Written by Shana Nys Dambrot

“Titled Talk to Us and Listen to Us (both works: 2021, 2-channel audio / video installation, endless loop), Thater packs a lot of poetry and dissonance into two installations. The color is warm and beckoning, while the literal cacophony is both mysterious and overwhelming. It’s loud and it’s hard to get a handle on. The human voices mimicking parrot voices which at times are themselves imitating human speech, intertwined with the lavishly expressive abstract natural language of these birds, blends and obscures and augments and eventually settles into a kind of rhythm. The soothing effect of the colored light flooding and unifying the space helps this process, anchoring the viewer to the room long enough for the poetics and onomatopeias to sort themselves out. “Up and down and in and out…To run, to walk, to dream. Bang, whistle, woo-hoo! Listen to us! Listen to us!””

Diana Thater: True Life Adventures Launches Art on theMART

True Life Adventures at Art on theMART

Diana Thater

True Life Adventures

Opening Saturday September 29 at 6:30pm 

On View September 30 - December 30, 2018

Art on theMART

Upper Wacker Drive between N. Wells St.  and N. Franklin St.

& The Jetty and Confluence areas on The Chicago Riverwalk

between Wells and Lake St., Chicago, IL 60654

On Saturday, September 29, 2018, pioneering new media artist Diana Thater will present a site-specific program of digital artworks entitled True Life Adventures during the large-scale public unveiling event of Art on theMART. Spanning the river façade of Chicago's theMART, the public installation will be the world's largest permanent digital art projection.

The film explores the plight of animals living in imminent danger of poaching in Kenya. In scaling images of flora and fauna to the size of theMART’s façade, Thater explores the intersection between the time-based and spatial dimensions of the moving image. Thater manipulates video projections, light, color and architecture to transport viewers around the world.

“For the Art on theMART opening program I’ve made a short film titled True Life Adventures. It collages together live footage of wild animals living in the Chyulu Hills near Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. My work focuses on nature and the remaining last bits of wildlife that we’re lucky enough to still have. Perhaps we can inhabit a space where these fragile creatures and understanding is part of our world. I want to bring them to Chicago as a kind of big splash of the wild in the midst of a great city," says Thater.

“The work is not narrative and linear - it is simultaneous - with multiple images inhabiting the screen at once, all moving in different directions at the same time. The accompanying soundtrack was all recorded live in Kenya, to further the exotic but peaceful story of elephants, zebras and giraffe in their native habitat.”

Art on theMART will be a first-of-its-kind, curated digital art installation across 2.5 acres (two football fields) of theMART's river façade. The installation's first season will include four contemporary, digital artworks by artists Thater, Zheng Chongbin, Jason Salavon, and Jan Tichy, using 34 projectors to illuminate building's exterior. Art on theMART marks the first time a projection of its size and scope will be completely dedicated to digital art with no branding, sponsorship credits or messaging. The City of Chicago and theMART have partnered to manage and curate the projected artwork for the duration of a thirty-year agreement. The inaugural installation will be on view for two hours each evening beginning at dusk Wednesdays through Sundays, September 30 through December 30, 2018.

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The Brooklyn Rail: Diana Thater with Steven Pestana

Diana Thater, Blitz, 2008. Installation view, Diana Thater: Here is a text about the world. . ., David Zwirner, New York, 2008. © Diana Thater. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

I first met Diana Thater in June at the opening of the Watershed, the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art's cavernous new project space facing the Boston Harbor. The ICA launched the venue, once an industrial metal facility, with a career-spanning selection of Thater's work. It was my first opportunity to encounter these architecturally transformative video installations in person. Immersed in a luminous sweep of the color spectrum, Thater's meditative images of natural phenomena left a strong visceral impression. The following interview took place on the last day of July at her home studio in Pasadena, CA with Thater vibrantly reaching for video excerpts, books, slideshows, and ephemera to illustrate the conversation. . .

By Steven Pestana

Full Interview

Boston Globe: Diana Thater, The ICA has arrived in Eastie. Here's your first look inside.

Diana Thater

July 4 - October 8, 2018

ICA Boston, The Watershed

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210

Since the Institute of Contemporary Art moved to the Seaport District, in 2006, its director, Jill Medvedow, has gazed out her museum windows mulling over how to artistically engage Boston Harbor, and how to reach across the water to East Boston.

On July 4, the ICA will open a new exhibition space there, the Watershed, in Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina. Museum admission will include a water taxi across the harbor. Admission to the Watershed is free, regardless of whether you’ve visited the ICA. This year, it will be open through Oct. 8. In the future, exhibitions will be on view from May to October.

The 15,000-square-foot venue consists of a large gallery for immersive installations, a smaller one spotlighting the history of East Boston, and a gathering place for community and educational projects. The first installation features work by video artist Diana Thater.

Thater, whose art explores the natural world’s peril in the face of human enterprise, often makes site-specific art that grapples with unusual spaces. Her largest work here, “Delphine,” engages the architecture and ties right to the water.

The piece features four large video projections of dolphins swimming undersea. The images slide hypnotically over walls and floor, encompassing viewers. A magenta sun laced with blue glows on a video wall. It’s all purposely disorienting, confounding perceptions of space and time. But with Boston Harbor just out the back door, it’s also right at home.

by Cate McQuaid

Full Article

Additional Articles:

New York Times, In an East Boston Shipyard, a Fresh Idea for Art

WBUR, A First Look Inside the New ICA Watershed in East Boston

Boston Magazine, Here's a Look Inside the ICA's New East Boston Location, The Watershed

ART NEWS, ' An Important and Perfect Spot'

HYPERALLERGIC: Diana Thater: LACMA Awards Grants to Four Artists Working on Innovative, Tech-Driven Projects

1301PE is proud to announce that Diana Thater is one of four recipients for this year's LACMA Art + Technology Lab grants.  

Many museums have been turning to technology to draw larger and younger audiences, devising various apps and interactive games.  But less explored, at least in the context of major encyclopedic museums, is the art itself that is currently engaging with technology.  

In 2013, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) formed the Art + Technology Lab with the aim of supporting artists who are exploring "emerging technologies". The idea stemmed from the museum's first Art and Technology program in 1967, which, four four years, "paired artists with technology companies in Southern California".  This time around the grant seems more geared toward nurturing artists' individual projects, providing monetary support (up to $50,000) and facilities to work in.  

Four artist were selected out of the 430 applications received: Tahir Hemphill, Jen Liu, Sarah Rara, & Diana Thater.

Diana Thater, a San Francisco-born, Los Angeles-based artist, is tackling that most enticing and terrifying of futuristic subjects: robots.  Through a video work titled "The Zeroth Law," Thater will reveal how "bio-inspired and biomimetic" robots "adapt the neurophysiology and behavior of their animal models." As Thater's recent exhibition at LACMA, The Sympathetic Imagination, illustrated, the artist has long been interested in animals and how they behave, producing videos that poetically show how bees speak and animals survive nuclear disasters. 

Full article

Diana Thater and Jack Goldstein: Pivotal: Highlights from the Collection

Pivotal: Highlights from the Collection

Orange County Museum of Art

850 San Clemente Dr
Newport Beach, CA 92660

On view through June 17th

OCMA has always championed artistic experimentation and innovation through a commitment to showing and collecting the work of dynamic and groundbreaking emerging artists. This installation will reveal how impactful OCMA has been in supporting the careers of some of the most influential artists from this region, often at pivotal moments in their careers.

This exhibition includes works by Diana Thater an Jack Goldstein.

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Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1984, acrylic on canvas, OCMA Collection

ProjectArt Annual Benefit at The Underground Museum

My Kids Could Do That: Famous Artists Put Their Childhood Drawings on view in LA

Openning Event: April 6th, 2018 at 7PM, on view through April 8th

1301PE artists, Petra Cortright, Diana Thater & Pae White are contributing works to this event.

How many times have you overheard—when standing in front of a contemporary work of art—a proud parent/disdainful viewer near you invoke the dismissive cliché: “my kid could do that?” Or maybe you’ve been guilty of thinking it yourself. We should all be so lucky to bear little geniuses that might grow up into the next Ed Ruscha, but sadly only a very small number ever reach that level. And those that do aren’t usually too quick to equate their career’s work with the output of a child.

So it’s unusual then, that a number of big-name contemporary U.S. artists—Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Lita Albuquerque, Catherine Opie, Diana Thater, Kenny Scharf, Alex Israel and Pae White among them—have decided to contribute their work to an exhibition named exactly that. But they’re not showing just any old work, they’re showing their old work—the art they made as children, lovingly preserved or perhaps rediscovered after languishing in boxes by their very own proud parents. Flying in the face of the idea that their geniuses are one in a million, these artists are putting their early scribbles on view in order to say: “Yes, your kid could do that.”

Opening April 6 at Los Angeles’ Underground Museum and on view for just three days, it’s part of a fundraising effort to raise support for ProjectArt, a nonprofit dedicated to making arts education available to children throughout the country by partnering with the public libraries for the use of space and hiring emerging artists as instructors. In spreading their mission, the organization recruited some of the most influential artists working today to talk about how art education got them to where they are today.

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Diana Thater: Floating Worlds, 14th Biennale de Lyon, France

14th Biennale de Lyon: Floating Worlds

20 September 2017 - 7 January 2018

Since its creation in 1991, Thierry Raspail, Artistic Director of the Biennale de Lyon, has asked each guest curator to think about a keyword, assigned for three editions. The 2017 Biennale de Lyon is the second volume of a trilogy around the word "modernity", and it was with this word that Thierry Raspail invited Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to imagine this 14th edition, at the Sucrière and macLYON from 20 September 2017 to 07 January 2018.

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Diana Thater: Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey

Diana Thater

A Runaway World

September 16, 2017–February 18, 2018

Borusan Contemporary

Baltalimanı Hisar Cad.

Perili Köşk No:5 34470

Rumeli Hisarı/Sarıyer

Istanbul Turkey

Diana Thater: A Runaway World (September 16, 2017‒February 18, 2018) comprises five video-based installations: three newly commissioned and two earlier works to provide context for the artist's examination of environmental issues. As Radical As Reality(2017) and A Runaway World (2017) were commissioned by The Mistake Room for the spring 2017 exhibition, that was also titled A Runaway World. The new installations incorporate video of elephants hunted by poachers for ivory; the last male Northern white rhinoceros, a species hunted to extinction for its horns; and the landscapes they inhabit. Thater and her crew gained unprecedented access to the creatures living in enclosures protected by armed guards. The videos are projected onto specially made X-shaped screens designed by the artist to create an immersive and somewhat disorienting experience.

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Independent Collectors: Interview with Clayton Press & Gregory Linn

Clayton Press and Gregory Linn are well known as early identifiers of emerging talents, many of which have developed into artists who are well recognized in the contemporary canon – from Richard Prince to Diana Thater, from Jutta Koether to Borna Sammak.

Our approach is to develop portraits of artists' careers, collecting several works – 5, 10, 15 – over time. For us, we are most interested in making a commitment to artists who are doing something fresh and evolutionary. We own paintings, time-based media, photography, sculpture, installation, and even several URLs (domain name and web application). Here is an example by Damon Zucconi, www.dictionary.blue.. By supporting these artists longer term, we feel – rightly or not – that we are encouraging them to push forward and through.

We took this approach first with the Pictures Generation, and then we did this with artists like Angela Bulloch, Stan Douglas, Zoe Leonard, Jason Rhoades, Kay Rosen, Diana Thater, Franz West, TJ Wilcox, and Christopher Williams in the 1990s. Next came, Matthew Brannon, Wade Guyton, Jutta Koether, Seth Price, and Kelley Walker in the 2000s. Now we are making similar, deep commitments to artists like Adam Henry, Jacob Kassay, Win McCarthy (whose work we first saw at Art Cologne in 2014), Borna Sammak, Kyle Thurman, and Damon Zucconi.

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Diana Thater: ARoS Triennial (The Garden - The Past), Denmark

ARoS Triennia: The Garden - The Past

April 8–July 30, 2017

The first ARoS Triennial will feature major new commissions and large-scale installations across the city of Aarhus, Denmark. Focusing on depictions of nature throughout history, the Triennial will be split into three sections: The Past, The Present and The Future. The launch of the Triennial will coincide with Aarhus’ year as European Capital of Culture.

The Past, which opens April 8, will span 400 years and will illustrate man’s relationship with nature: from the powerful orchestration of the baroque garden, the mathematically constructed landscapes of neo-classicism, and the sensuous gardens of the rococo to the monumental use of nature in land art projects and modern man’s impact on nature portrayed in contemporary art. The Past will provide the historical context for the Triennial theme and will be spread across several levels of the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, comprising more than 100 works (paintings, installations, video art, and sculptures) by artists including Nicolas Poussin, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Robert Smithson, and Meg Webster.

The Past will feature works by Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Antoine Watteau, Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice de Vlaminck, Emil Nolde, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Richard Long, Diana Thater, Meg Webster, Olafur Eliasson, Damián Ortega, Darren Almond, and Pamela Rosenkranz.

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Diana Thater: "A Runaway World " at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

Diana Thater: A Runaway World

The Mistake Room

1811 E. 20th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90058

April 1 - June 3, 2017

For her exhibition at The Mistake Room, Thater will present two works she produced in Kenya in 2016 and 2017. Conceived as both portraits and landscapes, the works will be staged within a unique architectural environment of free-standing screen structures that the artist designed. The works give us glimpses into the lives and worlds of two species on the verge of extinction—rhinos and elephants—and the illicit economies that threaten their survival.

The first work, As Radical as Reality, revolves around Sudan—the world's last surviving male white rhino. Protected from poachers by guards who accompany him at all times as he roams the grounds of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Sudan represents the last hope of his species but he has shown no interest in mating with the two female rhinos who also live at the Conservancy. When he dies, at some point in the near future, so will the rest of his kind. Thater was given unprecedented access to film Sudan and his guards. Over the duration of a week, Thater filmed Sudan and his human companions in the wild during the day and at night—capturing their daily lives from a very intimate perspective. For Thater, a species is a world unto itself—a configuration of existence that is worthy of our contemplation. Thus, in this work, Thater attempts to metaphorically assemble a portrait not only of a species, but also of an entire world coming to an end.

The second work, A Runaway World, captures a herd of Elephants that Thater filmed in Kenya's Chyulu Hills earlier this year. The elephants meander through on one screen as images of the terrain in which they reside are projected onto an intersecting one; gesturing to the relationship between the natural environment and survival. This changing landscape, forged by shifting images of majestic beings and the land between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Chyulu Hills, comes into focus only momentarily—reminding us of the fragility of the world and our complicity with its longevity.

Presented together in the space, this portrait of beasts and this landscape inhabited by beasts ask us to confront urgencies that are going to shape the well being of a future all species will inhabit and to accept a reality that too many today are attempting to frame as fiction. 

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