Artists Archive
F
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Recent shows include El Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Air de Paris, Paris; Regina Gallery, London and Moscow; MUSAC Contemporary Art Museu, Castilla y León, Spain; Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, Baltimore; Bunker Stuzki Contemporary Art Museum, Krakow; Mastermind, Casablanca; and Kunstlerhaus Wien, Vienna. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Metro Pictures, New York; T293, Napoli and Rome; Galerie Neu, Berlin; and Galerie Chantal Crousel/Air de Paris, Paris. She is now preparing a catalogue with Buchhandlung Walther König.
Learn moreMusician Erik Friedlander is widely considered a master avant-garde jazz and classical cellist. Friedlander has released nine solo albums and three albums as a member of the John Zorn-led avant-jazz group Bar Kokhba. In high demand as a session musician, he has played with a wide range of artists, from pop stars Kelly Clarkson and Courtney Love, to indie folk stars Dar Williams and Paula Cole, to fellow vanguard artists Ikue Mori (TBA:07) and Laurie Anderson (TBA:06). Friedlander’s father, Lee Friedlander, has been a MacArthur Fellow whose photographs of street scenes and jazz greats have been widely shown at galleries across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art.
Learn moreFawn Krieger is a New York-based artist whose multigenre works reimagine everyday sites like the shop and home. Her “stages” are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger’s Flintstonian tactility and penchant for scale compressions reveal an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), the Rose Art Museum (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007).
Learn moreForensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
Our investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
Learn moreFreddie Robins’ practice crosses definable categories of art, craft and design. She combines these elements elegantly, and with playful wit subverts meaning and making, fusing a melting-pot of approaches to ‘craft’.
She uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition, as well as the cultural preconceptions surrounding knitting as craft. Her work aims to disrupt the notion of the medium as passive and benign. Her pieces often incorporate both humour and fear. There is also a display of almost obsessive perfectionism in the quality of each piece’s hand-made finish.
Freddie Robins’ work is in several private and public collections, including the Government Art Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Crafts Council, Nottingham Castle Museum, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland and Kode, Bergen, Norway. She has exhibited internationally, including most recently, History in the Making: stories of materials and makers, 2000 BC – Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK; If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022, Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; I Put a Spell on You – New Magic and Mysticism, Art Exchange, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Creature Comforts, JGM Gallery, London, UK; Kette und Schuss, Mönchengladbach, Germany; CC binder, Puurs-Sint-Amands, Puurs, Belgium; and We are Commoners: Creative Acts of Commoning, a Craftspace national touring exhibition.
Currently Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, Robins is the 2025 Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Program, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR. She lives and works in Essex, UK and London, UK.
Learn moreFletcher is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. He has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over fifteen years. Fletcher is a Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Portland. Selected Press 500 Words: Harrell Fletcher, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum.com, February 1, 2010 Selected Video
Learn moreMona Vatamanu (Romania) and Florin Tudor (Switzerland) live in Bucharest, Romania, where they have been working together since 2000. Their practice spans film, photography, painting, performance, and installation, and reflects the social upheavals of post-communist Eastern Europe. The duo has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, and has been featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial and in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Vatamanu and Tudor have had residencies at Basis Voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht, AIR Vienna, and Project Room at Ludwig Museum in Budapest, among others. They received first prize in the 2006 Fair:Play Video Festival in Berlin. Vatamanu and Tudor are represented by Lombard Fried Projects, New York.
Peripheries
Moscow's Poplar Curse, New York Magazine, April 17, 2011.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Peter Falanga decided to attend school in New Orleans, Louisiana to study music at Loyola University New Orleans. Upon volunteering at the 2009 New Orleans Film Festival, he switched his major from music to film and digital media, and added a minor in philosophy. Immediately upon earning his BA, he decided to pursue a master’s degree that would align with his interests in philosophy, film theory, community outreach, and video making.
Peter moved to Portland, Oregon last August to become a member of the MA Critical Theory and Creative Research program’s inaugural cohort at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Currently, he is working on his master’s thesis, which is an extensive study of sincerity and its expression in the works of David Foster Wallace, the films of the New Sincerity, and in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.
Learn moreUtilizing the language and history of sculpture, installation, and conceptual art practices, Tannaz Farsi’s work highlights and re-presents objects and images that contextually start from a collective experience found in the current news or within the milieu of our cultural archive. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Disjecta (Portland, OR), Pitzer Art Galleries (Claremont, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH.) She has been granted residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2014. Born in Iran, Tannaz Farsi lives and works in Eugene, Oregon where she is faculty at the University of Oregon.
Learn moreMelanie Valera (Tender Forever) was born in Southwestern France in 1977. 3 albums (on K Records) and 800 shows later, she’s now pursuing multimedia projects for venues including La Cité Internationale (Paris) and the Whitney Museum (New York). Though she lives today in Portland, OR, her pop project leaps towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and, ultimately, hearts.
Learn moreTesar Freeman is an artist and amateur historian whose work is concerned with the revision of history and the physical vessels of ideologies. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Peripheries
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