Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (www.cohenvanbalen.com) have investigated the multiple materialities, modes of production, and long networks of contemporary technological culture in many of their installation and film works. This has ranged from work with bioengineering (Sterile) to work with the rare earth minerals and metals that form the backbone of contemporary media. In works such as H/AlCuTaAu and the later D/AlCuNdAu, they remediated the existing chemical elements of electronics and data centers into an odd sort of hybrid art-installation object; in 75 Watt, they investigated the long production networks of another sort of real, and yet imaginary, object as part of its production chain, producing a weird choreography of imaginary technology becoming a consumer product. Recently they embarked on a field trip to Congo, one that served both as artistic research and as a performance of returning some of the minerals back...
Take a Good Lamp
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen are London-based artists working across objects, installation, and film. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2008, they exhibit and lecture internationally. Recent exhibitions took place at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Lunds Konsthall, Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, HKW in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Recent screenings and artist talks include the ICA in London, TENT Rotterdam, Congo International Film Festival in Goma, and Cenart in Mexico City. Their work is in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York and M+ Museum in Hong Kong.
Revital Cohen, Tuur Van Balen; Take a Good Lamp. Cultural Politics 1 November 2016; 12 (3): 332–338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648882
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