ARTIST STATEMENT:
In this new millennium, heroes kill the Internet, land planes on water, and fast for justice. When a new hero acts, we are challenged to distend culturally overdrawn attitudes, reckon with our collective social conscience, and transfer mythology into positive harmonic realities. If not only for the freshness of new faces a lá Michelle Rodriguez or John Boyega (Star Wars: Episode VII), heroes stand to recalibrate what African scholar Kanu calls the “attitudinal orientations” of world socio-political thought. New attitudes, when fed into a myth-machine, reframe and widen our understanding of past and future cultural narratives. Through existential revelation and affirmations of love and triumph, hero stories create new pathways to social connectedness, transforming and re-humanizing the spirit inside of us.
 
Growing up as a young Ghanian-American, there existed in my early years a confluence of customs and belief systems that today inform my art practice. Spanning both African and Western cosmologies, these experiences influence my development as an artist and world citizen. From a hyphenated pose, a duality of conscience arises in my work. Concurrent histories uncover for me what John Coltrane defined as a “primal futurism”, for me a dipolar mode drawn as much from Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and Nietzsche’s Superman, as from the historical and lyrical resonance of W.E.B Dubois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
 
Employing the use of painting, 3D technology, and computer engineering, my interest lies squarely in the liminal spaces between power, tragedy, absurdity, and beauty, and the ways in which intercontinental dread is reconciled by the imagination. In these new works I am drawn to the excavation of fear, fantasy, and heroic action as a means to bridge seemingly disparate genealogies–be they literal or symbolic. To that affect Tiro, Millennium Soldier is a techno-visual quest–to explore the inception of one’s own personal mythology, the emergence of self as 21st century superhero.

 
ARTIST BIO:
AK (b.1980), born Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh.
 
Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, also known as “AK”, is a Ghanaian-American artist and musician born and residing in New York, NY. The artist received his BA from Amherst College in 2002, where he studied philosophy, religion and fine art. Heavily drawn to narrative folklore, fantasy and myth in African and Western traditions, Akwetey draws clear inspiration from themes of efficacy and transcendence. Through painting, mixed media, and voice, AK crafts historically active works that owe to the re-imagination of culture and the emergence of personal mythology. The artist sites Surrealism, West African, and American Popular Art (1960-) as strong influences. Akwetey’s work has exhibited at the Tate Modern Museum, The New Museum, LACMA, and the Gucci Museum in Florence, Italy. The artist also contributes voice and original song to the video essay Grosse Fatigue, the winner of the 2013 Venice Biennial’s Silver Lion Award.

Born in 1978, Camille Henrot lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Chisenhale Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC, where she produced the video Grosse Fatigue awarded by the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Camille Henrot currently has a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, which will travel to Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. She is nominated for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Camille Henrot is represented by kamel mennour, Paris; Johann König, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York.
 
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.