Founded as an experimental design studio in 2007, Metahaven has, over the years, extended its practice to visual art, filmmaking, and writing. On the heels of solo shows at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, founding members Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden join us to present recent moving-image work that uses cinematic storytelling as a “way of field reporting an indeterminate present”. Selections from Information Skies (2016), Hometown (2018) and Eurasia (2018) will be shown in their New York premieres.
“History was the first subject that lent itself to post-production.” Such is the essence of Metahaven’s thinking about political actors and artistic methodologies, and how the two have come to mirror each other in cinematic devices such as montage, duration, and the suspension of disbelief. In their films and installations, Metahaven’s critical views on agency and technology are interwoven with loose fictions that articulate visual, poetic and speculative patchworks of their own. The use of animation, for example, gestures equally to anime, video games, and user interfaces; in another instance, the Eurasian landscape is the through line connecting post-Soviet ghostly architecture, the oeuvre of Andrey Tarkovsky, and the Macedonian city that has come to be known as the “capital of fake news.”