With a priority to immerse the audience in sound, light, and motion, Nikita Gale’s END OF SUBJECT subverts understandings of viewership and prompts spectators to question their subjecthood amongst the installation and each other. Unrestricted by mediums, Gale engages with the architecture of her environment, stimulating all senses through site-specific installation and muses on the boundaries of performance art. She employs abolitionist ideology and institutional critique to simultaneously rupture and rebuild facets of the art institution.
With an introductory note by Ebony L. Haynes and a suite of poems by Harmony Holiday, this publication considers historical hierarchies of visibility. A contribution by the esteemed artist Andrea Fraser offers reflections on the various interventions at play during a gathering held in the exhibition.
96 pages
ISBN: 9781644230749
About the artist
Nikita Gale (b. 1983 Anchorage, Alaska)
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA.
Gale’s work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist’s practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.
Gale’s practice examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Gale’s broad-ranging installations – often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting – blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. By approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated.
The artist’s work has recently been exhibited at Chisenhale (London); LAXART (Los Angeles); 52 Walker (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York); California African American Museum (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).
Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita is a Contributing Editor at Triple Canopy.
