Amanda Beech: This Time
In association with its pre-launch programming, Remai Modern invited artists to realize original projects exclusively for online viewing. Through these commissions, the museum considered its website as an extension of its physical space and onsite program. Mobile and experimental, this online gallery allowed for direct, personal encounters with art while connecting artists and audiences across the globe.
From 2016-2020, the museum presented projects by: Ryan Gander, Tammi Campbell, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Thomas Hirschhorn, Taysir Batniji, Pedro Barateiro, Kara Uzleman, Rosa Barba, Amanda Beech, Ellen Moffat, Duane Linklater, Lynne Marsh, Raqs Media Collective, Ahlam Shibli, Ann Lislegaard, Anton Vidokly, Dave McKenzie, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory and Kelly Nipper.
This Time is a series of 10 short pop-up videos. Mimicking a video game tutorial, the work conflates a Machiavellian strategy for winning and maintaining power with contemporary curatorial diplomacy. The work interferes with access to Remai Modern’s website, but also occupies the museum by becoming an extension of its real and virtual architecture. Beech’s work questions the essence of Modernity and what it takes to recover the Modern from within a dizzyingly complex cultural and political economy, where a museum can be exchanged for a hard drive. By incorporating maps, diagrams and references to Remai Modern’s design, Beech’s videos offer wry instruction on how to be Modern today.
Project credits:
David Kirk, Voice
Mina Shoiab, Graphics
Amanda Beech (b. Cheshire, UK, 1972) is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Drawing from popular culture, critical philosophy and real events, her work manifests in different media including critical writing, video installation, drawing, print and sculpture. Using a range of compelling rhetorical and often dogmatic narratives and texts, Beech’s work poses questions and propositions for what a new realist art can be in today’s culture: that is, a work that can articulate a comprehension of reality not restricted to human experience.
Beech has shown her artwork and presented her writing at major international venues including Covenant Transport Move or Die at The Baltic Center for Contemporary Art (2016), and Sanity Assassin, in Neocentric, at Charim Gallery, Vienna, Austria (2016). Other recent work includes her contributions to What Hope Looks Like After Hope, Homeworks VII Beirut City Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2015), Bots, Bodies and Beasts, at Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam (2015); Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain (2015), and the presentation of the three-channel video installation Final Machine at both Agitationism at the Irish Biennial (2014) and L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale (2014). Beech’s published writing includes essays for the anthologies Speculative Aesthetics, Urbanomic (2014), Realism, Materialism, Art, Sternberg Press (2015), and contributions for the Irish and the Montreal Biennales’ catalogues. Her artist’s books include First Machine, Final Machine, LPG (2015), Final Machine, Urbanomic (2013), and Sanity Assassin, Urbanomic (2010). Beech is Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, California, USA.