In her multifaceted practice, Monica Bonvicini (b. 1965, Venice, Italy) explores the relationship between architecture, power structures, gender roles, control mechanisms and space in a critical way. This interest stems from the belief that each space has a distinctive character which triggers in people different reactions, based on everyone’s sensitivity and receptiveness.
Her research is translated into works that question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language, and the limits and possibilities connected to the ideal of freedom. This work belongs to the “Pleasant” series of mirrors depicting quotes and edited texts, all centred around the discomfort stemming from relationships and living within domestic walls.
«Everyone can make the associations they want – Bonvicini says – For me, sexuality is a way of expressing in an ironic and reckless way what I want to say about issues which perhaps I could not talk about in any other way».

Many works by Martin Boyce (b. 1967, Hamilton, Scotland) feature elements that appear to have lost their function. Drawing on the familiar shapes of devices that may have become anachronistic, the artist's seems to imagine their being as lived experience. Especially telephones have recurred as a motif and their significance goes far beyond their material existence.
As Boyce mentions: "Do landline telephones remember the conversations they have been party to or are they simply vessels, inanimate conduits for words and silences? Even in a public phone box, the telephone is an interior object, it can only dream of the distant places that it connects to. The pale blue wall of the phone panel has been painted and over-painted, like one sky laid on top of many others… The phone is somewhere inside but perhaps dreams of faraway skies."

Lawrence Lek’s (b. 1982, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) work often addresses the moral dilemmas around AI while exploring the creative potential of digital worldbuilding shot through with dark, absurdist humour.
Lek’s multimedia installation “Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot”, for the Frieze Artist Award commission, combines narrative worldbuilding and mechanical sculpture in a gaming environment, where players gradually uncover the story of the eponymous ‘carebot’: a cyborg therapist developed to talk other AI out of existential self-destruction. Haunting and meditative, the project draws inspiration from ‘walking simulators’ – video games in which players explore an environment.
“If an A.I. is going to process the wealth of media made about humanity, a lot of that stuff is pretty emotional in terms of content and expression. For A.I. to imitate and then truly feel emotions would parallel human development,” – says the artist.

Heemin Chung’s (b. 1987, Seoul, South Korea) artwork explores the sensorial impact of transitional states – from darkness to light, from virtual to physical – in the rapidly changing city of Seoul.
As Chung explains, in this city, technology has gone beyond mere convenience and has fundamentally altered our relationship with space and time. This work unfolds a world of shadows, replicas and rituals, becoming a part of the investigation of our contemporary condition, including a reimagining of the traditional Korean funeral ritual Chobun.
“My work often begins with a very subtle and fleeting sensation, almost like a whisper that moves between the physical and the virtual,” states the artist.

In his artwork, Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) interrogates how political violence is disseminated into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape. Shaped by the vibrant artistic scene of postwar Beirut in the 1990s, Cherri began to investigate the sensorial coproduction of reality between images of conflict, the urban fabric and his own body.
In a series of interventions on archaeological collections, Cherri sets out to confront the traditional signifiers of value in the museum by reintroducing fragments and artefacts that had been otherwise discarded in the form of hybrid creatures that embody the history of archaeology as a tale of colonial violence.

Since the millennium, Carol Bove (b. 1971, Geneva, Switzerland) has focused on the interdependence of artworks and their contexts. A poetic use of artefacts and materials including found objects and industrial hardware, along with an acute awareness of architectural sites and modes of display, continues to steer her practice.
Embracing the strategies of modernist formalism as a point of departure, her current metal sculptures explore previously overlooked openings in the conventional narrative of art history. For her new sculpture, Bove works with both treated and untreated materials, allowing each piece to evolve according to its environment and the season, acting just like a brand-new tree.