PRELUDE 2016

At PRELUDE, eleven public art installations set the stage for the exciting announcement of Aurora’s theme for its 2018 edition. The weekend showcased a variety of artistic, cultural, and culinary experiences from Dallas and the international community.



Eleven esteemed artists had been selected to exhibit at the PRELUDE event. London-based artist Quayola presented Pleasant Places, an ultra high definition film projection inspired by 17th century landscape prints, covering the 20,000 square feet of the Meyerson Symphony Center’s facade. Acclaimed Indian artist Shilpa Gupta created a participatory neon light installation using text to invoke the thought of a daydream. Audio-kinetic sculptor Herman Kolgen, hailing from Montreal, tapped into the pulse of the natural environment. Korean artist collectives Ujoo+limheeyoung and teamVOID each showed works that reflect on our technological era. Ujoo+limheeyoung’s art practice gives life to fantasy world machines, while teamVOID form moving patterns using kinetic and wave-like optical illusions. Tramaine Townsend‘s artistic practice uses scientific methods to manipulate and design abstract patterned visuals. Alicia Eggert & Safwat Saleem collaborated on a light and text piece that illuminated widespread political issues in the world’s most commonly spoken languages. Antonin Fourneau’s interactive installation invited the audience to draw ephemeral messages with light.

PRELUDE was presented by AT&T Performing Arts Center and was open to the public on Friday October 21st and Saturday October 22nd, 2016.

CURATORS

Dooeun Choi


Justine Ludwig


Nadim Samman

ARTISTS

Alicia Eggert & Safwat Saleem

Alicia Eggert is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the relationship between language, image and time. Eggert’s art work has been exhibited internationally, at venues such as the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing and the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas in Denton. Safwat Saleem is a Pakistani-American visual artist and graphic designer. He’s best known for making politically-charged satirical art. Saleem is also the founder of Bandbaja, a Pakistani music magazine and a TED Senior Fellow.

Antonin Fourneau

In 2005 Antonin Fourneau has been focused on interaction and relation with popular culture. He created a collaborative project about innovation and new form of funfair named Eniarof. Most of his research focus on the pleasure to interact with large group of people. He took part in various exhibitions related to digital arts. He is currently professor of Digital Arts in ENSAD and guest to teach in several schools like CAFA-Beijing.




Shilpa Gupta employs performance, video, photography, sculpture, and new media to realize her artistic vision. Words are carefully intertwined with visual elements in order to provide a deeper level of understanding. Through this synthesis of text and image, the artist tackles issues of war, security, hope, identity, and borders. While Gupta’s work is inspired by life in India, it truly looks at larger global phenomenon.





Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations.




An acclaimed multidisciplinary artist with more than two decades of experience in media arts, Herman Kolgen lives and works in Montreal. An audio-kinetic sculptor, he draws his raw material from the intimate relationship between sound and image. Kolgen creates pieces that take on the form of installations, video, performance and sound sculptures.



teamVOID is a duo media artist by Junbong Song and Jaehyuck Bae. They focus on convergence of art and technology from a system point of view. teamVOID designs experimental systems and creates artworks through various media such as interactive media, kinetic sculpture, light art.



Tramaine Townsend is a visual artist and photographer. His Works explores a minimal approach with calculated production and intensive design. He utilizes these subjects in various mediums for viewers to align it as experience. One through simple and direct imagery.

The work of Ujoo+limheeyoung starts out of fictional stories. They tell absurd, nonsensical stories; stories about the unknowable; stories about things that go unseen in reality.

When reality begins to seem meaningless and irrational, where situations in utter opposition to any justifiable ideas or standards or contrary to reason repeat over and over, this shows a contradiction and gap with the reality that they desire.