SUPERFLEX,  Still from Flooded McDonald's, 2009 — SUPERFLEX, Still from Flooded McDonald's, 2009

SUPERFLEX: Flooded McDonald’s on view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Ricardo Alessio August 20, 2017

Hammer Contemporary Collections

SUPERFLEX, Flooded McDonald's

19 August - 15 October 2017

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90024

The film Flooded McDonald's poses questions about consumer culture and the fast food industry.

Flooded McDonald's is the second film by the artist collective SUPERFLEX. In the video, a life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald's restaurant slowly floods with water until it is completely submerged and destroyed. Based in Denmark, Sweden, and Brazil, the members of SUPERFLEX consider their works "tools" for investigating systems of power, globalization, and the role of the artist in contemporary society. Flooded McDonald's poses questions about consumer culture and the fast food industry while reveling in the pleasure of destroying a global capitalist icon.

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Kirsten Everberg, Studio, Gaeta (after Twombly), 2015, Oil and enamel on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches

Kirsten Everberg: Garden Party Auctions, museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium

Ricardo Alessio August 20, 2017

museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

Museumlaan 14

9831 Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium

Saturday, September 2nd, 2017

Annual Garden Party

On Saturday, September 2nd, 2017 the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens organises the eleventh edition of its annual Garden Party. The successful Paddle8 auction and the Christie's live charity auction are assured to be the highlights of this happening yet again.

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Installation view of Diana Thater’s The Starry Messenger, 2014, at the Moody Center for the Arts, 2017. 9-monitor video wall. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London. Photo Nash Baker

Glasstire: Diana Thater: ‘The Starry Messenger’ at the Moody Center

Ricardo Alessio August 9, 2017

I was lying on the ground one night at an artist residency in rural Pennsylvania. There were no clouds, no smog —I've never seen so many stars receding into infinity. The sky was so clear and the night so crisp that it was easy to make out a clear outline of the Milky Way. It wasn't how we normally see it in science textbooks or NASA posters; I was looking at the Milky Way turned on its side. It looked like a dense, fat, pixelated line — like a tail that, in one whisk, could fling us out into deep space — a place capable of immense obliteration and violence, a place of silence and timelessness. It felt immersive and very far away. It was majestic.

Diana Thater's The Starry Messenger (2014), currently on view at the Moody Center at Rice University, is not that.

Nor does she want it to be. Thater is instead using the act of stargazing as a seduction technique, to entangle us in a piece that interrogates our human need to separate ourselves from a fetishized "nature," one that cultivates frustration and desire, and that challenges us to be bored. She does this by layering our experience of her piece: the meta-mediated experience of Thater's recording of a projection of the Milky Way inside a planetarium; the mediated experience of her filming the projector inside the planetarium, and the immediacy of us viewing it all through a nine-monitor grid.

On view at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston until February 3, 2018.

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1301PE participating in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Ricardo Alessio July 14, 2017

Jorge Méndez Blake at 1301PE

More than 65 art galleries in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California will participate in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Getty-led exploration of Latin American and Latino art that launches on September 15, 2017, and runs through January 2018. Complementing PST: LA/LA's expansive roster of exhibitions, performances, and public programs at more than 70 museums and cultural institutions, participating galleries will present more than 90 group and solo exhibitions, artist-curated projects, and installations in Downtown Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica, Hollywood, West Hollywood, and beyond. Throughout the four-month initiative, a vibrant cross-section of emerging and established galleries will join in celebrating Latin American and Latino artists, and will bring works to the region by both internationally-known artists who will be shown on the West Coast or in the United States for the first time and emerging talent from across Latin America and the U.S.

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Artnews

LA Times

Philippe Parreno turns exhibition spaces into the exhibition, at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Photography: © Andrea Rossetti 2017 — Philippe Parreno turns exhibition spaces into the exhibition, at the Rockbund Art Museum
in Shanghai. Photography: © Andrea Rossetti 2017

Wallpaper: Philippe Parreno transforms the Rockbund Art Museum in a perpetual motion of events

Ricardo Alessio July 14, 2017

Philippe Parreno transforms the Rockbund Art Museum in a perpetual motion of events by Charlotte Jansen

For the past two decades French-born artist Philippe Parreno has used museums as his material. Known best for his recent installations at Tate Modern, HangarBicocca and the Palais de Tokyo, he has turned exhibition spaces into the exhibition. Instead of installing art on the walls, Parreno begins with what already exists in the architecture of a building, choreographing light, sound, image and space in an ephemeral dance.

Parreno's first ever exhibition in China follows a similar strategy. 'Synchronicity', at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai until mid September, sees window blinds opening and closing over a window like a blinking eye, casting different shadows over a room. A heliostat shunts natural sunlight through the glass rooftop over the floor below. On the third storey, an illuminated marquee constructed in glass — referencing the skylight design of the museum's upper floors — plays music that can be heard throughout the space. The artist even nods to the design of the building, completed in 1933 and restored by David Chipperfield in 2010: his vertical plane slices through four of the building's six floors, referencing the central axis and the overall harmony of the space.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija, Karl's Perfect Day, 2017, s16mm/arri digital, color, sound 5.1, 1h33mins. — Rirkrit Tiravanija, *Karl's Perfect Day*, 2017, s16mm/arri digital, color, sound 5.1, 1h33mins.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Film premiers at the International Film Festival Marseille, France

Ricardo Alessio July 13, 2017

Rirkrit Tiravanija's film, Karl's Perfect Day (2017) will premier at the International Film Festival Marseille.

15 July – 3:45 pm

16 July – 5:30 pm

FID 28th International Film Festival Marseille

July 11-17

Karl perfect day is a portrait of artist and poet Karl Holmqvist thru the own idea of what a perfect day is to him. Is a journey from the time he wakes up to the time he returns to bed. The journey is constructed in Karl's mind, like his own work and artistic interests. Is a collage of peoples, places, sounds, images and texts. His idea of the perfect day is not one of extravagance but rather modest, layer with complexities and significance with moments of contentedness and small pleasures. Seemingly the film of Karl's perfect day perfectly looks like another day in a life of a person.

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Philippe Parreno: Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China

Ricardo Alessio July 8, 2017

Philippe Parreno

Synchronicity

8 July - 17 September 2017

Rockbund Art Museum

20 Huqiu Road

Huangpu District, Shanghai

China

1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Philippe Parreno's exhibition, Synchronicity, at the Rockbund Art Museum. It will be Parreno's first major solo exhibition in China. This exhibition is dedicated to the late Xavier Douroux whose influence on Parreno's career cannot be overstated.

Curated by the Director of the museum, Larys Frogier, Parreno's first exhibition in China will occupy four of the museum's six floors, also extending to its seventh floor glass rooftop.

Over the past twenty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition going experience by exploring its possibilities as a medium in its own right. Realised in dialogue with the physicality and functionality of the museum's architecture, the exhibition will alter the building's current existence through an unexpected use of time, space, light, and sound to become a semi automated puppet, a perpetual motion of events in which Parreno subverts the conventions of the gallery space.

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View of Kerry Tribe's "the word the wall la palabra la pared," Parque Galería, Mexico City, 2017.

Art Agenda: Kerry Tribe’s “the word the wall la palabra la pared”, Parque Galería, Mexico City

Ricardo Alessio July 1, 2017

Kerry Tribe's "the word the wall la palabra la pared" by Catalina Lozano

PARQUE GALERíA, Mexico City

May 6–July 1, 2017

For her first exhibition in Mexico City, LA-based artist Kerry Tribe removed the front wall of Parque Galería and transformed it into a makeshift screening room. The crumbling architecture, with its exposed dry walls and frayed edges, introduces an exhibition in which seemingly solid physical and psychical structures are undone.

Tribe's work addresses perception, memory, and language, as well as the technologies used to perceive, record, and describe experience. Combining video, sculpture, and photography, her latest exhibition considers how atypical circumstances—such as alterations in the mechanisms of reception and emission in the brain—create opportunities to analyze the norms by which fitness and unfitness are defined. By paying attention to the anomalous, Tribe tackles new, affective configurations of knowledge.

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Jorge Pardo poses in front of a new art piece, which he invites children to add to, at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas.

Del Mar Times: Jorge Pardo leaves his mark at the Lux Art Institute

Ricardo Alessio July 1, 2017

Jorge Pardo leaves his mark at the Lux Art Institute by Brittany Woolsey

Lux Art Institute

4550 South El Camino Real

Encinitas, CA

On view through Aug. 5.

When Jorge Pardo was invited to spend time as an artist in residence at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, he had a set goal in mind: to create an original, new art piece in just five days.

The Mexico-based artist spent June 12 through June 17 staying at the Lux to work on the large canvas-based piece. Other artists have in the past chosen to spend up to a month there.

"I gave myself a week to make something that would be interesting, and that's really the only agenda here," he said in an interview on the day he he arrived at the studio. "The interesting thing is to use the space and to make something here. They're very flexible about how and what artists do. Residency can be a lot of things: it can be a retreat for people or it can be work."

During his time at Lux, he created a 5-foot-by-30-foot scroll work that is covered with silkscreen ink in bright colors such as pinks, purples and oranges. He had planned the work for months, with materials sent over ahead of time, to make the most out of his stay at the Lux, he said.

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Fiona Banner: De Pont Museum documentary by Maarten de Kroon

Ricardo Alessio June 17, 2017

Fiona Banner: Runway (AW 17)

De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands

Through 27 August 2017

Documentary by Maarten de Kroon

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Untitled, 2013. Set of three acrylic lamps, dimensions variable — *Untitled,* 2013. Set of three acrylic lamps, dimensions variable

Jorge Pardo: Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA

Ricardo Alessio June 17, 2017

Jorge Pardo

On exhibit

June 12, 2017 through August 5, 2017

Lux Art Institute

1550 S. El Camino Real

Encinitas, CA 92024

Havana-born artist Jorge Pardo has been recognized as a MacArthur "genius" and featured in the collections of some of the world's top museums, and he once spent six years designing a utopian compound in the depths of the jungles of the Yucatán. This summer, San Diegans can witness him at work during a five-day residence at Lux Art Institute (June 12-17), followed by an exhibition of his vibrant, genre-defying artworks. June 12 to Aug. 5. Lux Art Institute, 1550 S. El Camino Real, Encinitas. $5; free for members. (760) 436-6611 or luxartinstitute.org

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Kerry Tribe, Rinse and Repeat, 2017. 10 minutes, single channel video with sound, vid-eo (still), courtesy of the artist.

Kerry Tribe: Chalk Circles at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA

Ricardo Alessio June 17, 2017

Kerry Tribe

Chalk Circles

Saturday, June 17, 2017 to Sunday, August 20, 2017

Opening Reception June 17, 4-9pm

REDCAT

631 West 2nd Street

Los Angeles, CA 90012

The Gallery at REDCAT presents Chalk Circles, an exhibition and series of related performances and events that consider the ways in which performing and visual arts intersect. Curated by Ruth Estévez and José Luis Blondet, the exhibition Chalk Circles stages a number of ways in which artists think critically about live actions, theater and performance.

Artists in this exhibition document, reimagine, and rearticulate acting methodologies to investigate performance as a form of production, not just as an event-based form. Their projects center on mixed traditions of movement, acting and gesture, as well as pedagogic models. The role of the actor, the figure of the performer, and their different perspectives in the construction of a character inform several projects in the exhibition, while others focus on the frictions of a body in a fictive—theatralized—space.

Chalk Circles features works and commissions by local and international artists who engage in theatricality and performativity as a tool to feed the instability of such terms. Artists included in the exhibition: Carola Dertnig, Dora García and Peio Aguirre, Adrià Julià, Joachim Koester, David Levine, Emily Mast, Silke Otto-Knapp, Santiago Roldós and Pilar Aranda (Muégano Teatro), Catherine Sullivan and Kerry Tribe.

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Pae White: Artists on Art, LACMA video series

Ricardo Alessio June 17, 2017

Pae White

LACMA's Artists on Art video series

For Artists on Art, Pae White speaks on Soup Tureen and Ladle by Christopher Dresser.

LACMA's Artists on Art videos offer insights into works in the museum's encyclopedic collection that have inspired and informed artists working today. Looking at art through their eyes, we hear directly from artists about works that intrigue them and have fed their own creativity.

Pae White's practice straddles the line between what is thought of as "high art" and "functional object." I; in fact, her creations often—and purposefully—are both, finding their place simultaneously in the worlds of art, craft, and design. Her work ranges from intimate installations incorporating Vera scarves to large-scale tapestries, based on photos of crumpled aluminum foil or plumes of smoke and made on computer-driven looms. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Artnet news: Is Capitalism Doomed? A New Museum Imagines the Downfall of the Economic System

Ricardo Alessio June 14, 2017

Is Capitalism Doomed? A New Museum Imagines the Downfall of the Economic System by Brian Boucher

If capitalism is slowly on the outs, as some economists and theorists say it is, should there be a museum to preserve its artifacts? The Museum of Capitalism (MOC), an aspiring institution at the very earliest phase of development, opens its first exhibition this month in a disused warehouse in Oakland, California. Its ambitious goal is to educate future generations about the economic system's "ideology, history, and legacy," per its mission statement, in the vein of history museums and so-called museums of conscience.

Headed up by the artist duo FICTILIS (Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau) and supported by a $215,000 grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, its debut exhibition is to be housed in a temporary space in Oakland's post-industrial Jack London Square, an area with multiple vacant warehouses. The artist list, totaling a whopping 83, includes members from around the globe.

Museum of Capitalism

55 Harrison St, Suite 201

Oakland CA 94607

Opening Exhibition

17 June – 20 August 2017

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Tacita Dean, The last beautiful pleasure., 2017. Installation view 1301PE.

LA Weekly: 5 Art Shows to See in L.A. This Week

Ricardo Alessio June 14, 2017

5 Art Shows to See in L.A. This Week by Catherine Wagley

Smoking in the grass

Downstairs at 1301PE, actress Sylvia Kristel holds a cigarette in a 16mm film that's being projected on a wall. Smoke rises against the lush yard in which she's standing. Artist Manon de Boer filmed Kristel, who died in 2012, in the Hollywood Hills in the early 2000s. The footage is quiet and the actress stoic. Upstairs, another 16-millimeter film plays. This time, it's iconic painter David Hockney who holds a cigarette and quietly smokes in his studio. Sometimes he laughs. Tacita Dean filmed him just last year and, over the course of 16 minutes, we see him smoke five cigarettes. This show, called "The last beautiful pleasure," marks 1301PE's 25th anniversary and drips with nostalgia — for a time when too many of us still found chainsmoking romantic.

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Diana Thater, As Radical as Reality, 2017, Plexiglas, steel, two-channel video projection (color, silent, indefinite duration). Installation view. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. — **Diana Thater, *As Radical as Reality*, 2017,** Plexiglas, steel, two-channel video projection (color, silent, indefinite duration). Installation view. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Artforum: Diana Thater at The Mistake Room

Ricardo Alessio June 4, 2017

Diana Thater at The Mistake Room by Alexander Keefe

"I'm always working with multiple, simultaneous perspectives," Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater explained to Lynne Cooke in an interview published on the occasion of her 2015 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This statement makes sense, given the complexity of Thater's subject matter: the networked entanglements between human and other, species and habitat, viewer and viewing space, zebra and zeal (the last a term of venery for a group of zebras). "A Runaway World" adds to the artist's bestiary of transitory media architectures. The show presents two cruciform structures. Each is composed of four Plexiglas sheets arranged via metal scaffolding to form the prone Xs; their four sets of moving images alternately bleed into and jarringly abut each other, creating bifurcated viewing environments that choreograph the body into position, then divide and mend the gaze. Viewed from afar, the screens appear as moving images in the round; up close, these immersive viewing stations facilitate what Thater describes as an "in-between space and time that we (humans and animals) can occupy together, whose mode is instinct and whose affect is beyond simple emotion."

Thater has been working with architectural screening environments since 1995's six-channel video projection China, a Deleuzian body trip into the multiple subjectivity of the pack wolf that muses on what it might be like to feel like many instead of one. Travel and zoological research have formed key parts of her practice ever since; both works in the current exhibition emerged from trips to Kenya in 2016 and 2017. The piece that gives the exhibition its title draws from footage of a herd of African elephants that the artist filmed in the country's Chyulu Hills. Images of elephants dominate the screens, singly and in groups, viewed from up close and far away. These intersect with scenes of the threatened landscape that the magnificent creatures inhabit: rolling grasslands and distant mountains, gorgeous trees isolated in motion against azure skies. Thater has said of her work that it "must have a presence like a subject." An installation like this one conjures and sustains a particular interplay of subjectivities, here entangling viewer, elephant, and land in what feels like a daydream. But it's also something of a nightmare.

Few animals are as emblematic of species loss as the northern white rhinoceros named Sudan, the subject of the adjacent work As Radical as Reality, 2017, a moving meditation on extinction in the Anthropocene. Per the show's press release, the last surviving male of his species has shown little interest in mating with the last two remaining females that accompany him in the Kenyan conservancy that shelters them (an assertion that is challenged by the conservancy, which provides the sobering counter that Sudan's two female companions are themselves incapable of normal copulation). Soon his advancing age will preclude reproduction regardless. To make matters worse, poachers would love to have his horn. Species loss and individual death are inseparable in this pathetic story; so are human and rhinoceros. Thater's installation creates a space to encounter Sudan as he lives, a rhino in a post-rhino world, ringed by the armed guards who will accompany him everywhere until someday—too soon—security team becomes funeral escort. And we stand and mourn.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller, DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY, 2017.

e-flux: ARoS Triennial, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller

Ricardo Alessio June 4, 2017

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller

DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY

June 3–July 30, 2017

ARoS Triennial

Various locations

Aarhus, Denmark

DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY is located at the beach near Mindepark, Aarhus

For The Garden, the first ARoS Triennial in Aarhus, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller have developed a new version of their ongoing project DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY comprised of a pavilion and a dense program of films, talks and cooking.

In the logic of an exquisite corpse, the pavilion can be seen as a disembodied part of the future artist residency and workshop at The Land, a self-sustaining artistic community initiated by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert near Chiang Mai in Thailand that engages with the idea of an artistic utopia and presents both an ecological and sustainable model for future artistic practice. Reminiscent of a Surrealist "exquisite corpse"—beginning with a single contribution that continues to grow piecemeal—various architects, engineers, and artists will contribute different building components (such as structure, façade, etc.) to this unusual architectural assemblage as a collective work.

After its first manifestation at Art Basel in 2015, the pavilion in Aarhus presents the first version of the building in its future dimensions of 22x22 meters. The structure houses several kitchen and garden elements within which the various themes of the project will be played out. Investigating models and practices of sustainability, the geopolitics of food, and building technologies in the era of the anthropocene, Tiravanija, Hirsch and Müller have put together a public program that runs daily from June 3 to July 30.

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Paul Winstanley, Lost (After Saenredam), 2016, oil on gesso on panel, 72 x 66 cm / 28.3 x 26 in — Paul Winstanley, *Lost (After Saenredam)*, 2016, oil on gesso on panel, 72 x 66 cm / 28.3 x 26 in

The Irish Times: Paul Winstanley, Minimalism in the Dutch Golden Age at the Kerlin

Ricardo Alessio June 1, 2017

Minimalism in the Dutch Golden Age at the Kerlin by Aidan Dunne

Paul Winstanley: Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings
Kerlin Gallery, South Anne St, Dublin

The key work in his new show at the Kerlin is his recreation, or re-imagination, of a lost painting of Mariakerk by Saenredam. Winstanley set about approximating it by referring to a surviving, precise preparatory sketch. Then he moved on to make another painting of Mariakerk, but from a slightly altered viewpoint, so that we can see a window and a golden tapestry, both of which, he points out, were documented as being there. But in composing his painting, Saenredam made sure neither would be seen, though he did include comparable elements in other paintings. The bottom line is that Winstanley's re-imagination of the Saenredam is of course a Winstanley. And perhaps our version of anything is uniquely our own.

Other paintings include people looking at paintings in the National Gallery, London. A man and a woman stand before a Vermeer. A larger group moves around in front of a religious icon painting. The moving figures are blurred as though by a long photographic exposure. The figures are ephemeral, the artworks fixed and bathed in light. There's also a painting of a recurrent subject: a birch tree, which of course changes all the time even in its constancy. Seeing is believing, but the implication of these beautifully poised works is that our faith may be misplaced.

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Diana Thater, The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals, 1998 — Diana Thater, *The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals*, 1998

Independent Collectors: Interview with Clayton Press & Gregory Linn

Ricardo Alessio June 1, 2017

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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From left, Fenger, Christiansen and Nielsen of the Danish art collective Superflex. Nikolaj Møller/Blink Production — From left, Fenger, Christiansen and Nielsen of the Danish art collective Superflex.
Nikolaj Møller/Blink Production

Newsweek: Superflex Uses Humor to Challenge Corporate Power

Ricardo Alessio June 1, 2017

Joke's on You: Superflex Uses Humor to Challenge Corporate Power by Francesca Gavin

Sitting around the white Ikea-like desk in their studio, on the ground floor of a low-key office building in the gentrified northern part of Copenhagen, the core members of the Danish art group Superflex seem far less confrontational than you might expect. From their bases in Copenhagen, Stockholm and London, Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen have been working together for 25 years on politically charged projects that have taken them everywhere from Texas to Africa, via Bangkok, Japan and many of the world's most prestigious art galleries. This year sees their most high-profile commission to date, with the recent announcement that they are the latest artists invited to fill the vast Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern. Yet, despite the glamorous-sounding projects and their globe-trotting lifestyle, the three men, all in their 40s, appear surprisingly grounded, dressed in casual clothes, with a beard here, some gray hair there and plenty of lines around the eyes.

Talking about their provocative work—which has included such pieces as an exact replica of the toilets used by the U.N. Security Council in New York, erected on a beach in the Netherlands in 2010, and a video installation, made in 2009, that attempted to hypnotize viewers so that they might perceive climate change from the perspective of a cockroach—they are serious, patient and have a clear sense of their approach. Intent on challenging globalization and power structures, they call their works "tools," suggesting a broader application beyond art.

Though their mission is pugnacious, playfulness is central to the Superflex worldview. "Humor is just one of the buttons you can press. It's very effective. It's also challenging. It's not just fun," says Nielsen. The collective's work questions economic systems and the commodification of art, but the artists also highlight the comedy innate in everyday life. They call 1970s Danish children's television a main source of inspiration, and their works are more likely to be experiences rather than objects. "We want to do things that have an impact," Christiansen says. "Understanding the systems and the game of the realities that we choose to participate in is crucial. Let's say it's important to smash things before you can move on."

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