Everything that is created will sooner or later collapse, crumble and cease to exist. The products of creative power, such as the solar system or social systems, are by definition temporary, yet they can bring about lasting changes in the natural environment, people’s lives, and inform the ways we engineer and reengineer history. In BUILT, American artists Akeem Smith and Tommy Malekoff draw on divergent methods to explore how the body and the built environment contend with brutality and impermanence.

Curated by New Canons’ Maxwell Wolf, the exhibition silhouettes two installations by the artists whose practices bend the boundaries of video art and blur the distinction between artist, archivist and documentarian. Whereas memory and material, like faith and infrastructure, are inherently subject to deterioration, Smith and Malekoff evoke new epochs, fuelling the potential of what can arise amidst all that remains in the void thereafter.

The works in BUILT travel from two critically acclaimed presentations originally organized by Wolf: Smith's breakout show No Gyal Can Test (New York 2020, Detroit 2021), which earned him glowing praise in Artforum, Frieze, Garage, W, NYT Style and The New York Times, and Malekoff’s largest project to date, Forever and Forever (New York 2022), an immersive video installation, mounted this past Spring in an abandoned space in the bowels of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan - an experience the New York Times’ Max Lakin compared to "channel surfing the apocalypse”.

For his presentation at BRUTUS, Queens Street (2020), Smith enlists archival material, and salvaged architectural remnants transplanted from his hometown of Kingston Jamaica. The video installation harvests artefacts from the past to confront the legacy of the artist’s own enduring memory; an exercise of beguiling oblivion, woven within a larger lyrical homage to the women that raised him.

In his imposing multi-channel video work Forever and Forever, 2022, Malekoff maps the present impact of human intervention throughout the American landscape. The work features footage the artist captured over two years in the Everglades region of southern Florida. By moving past the morality of ecological decay, the artist illuminates an alternate vista that fluctuates seamlessly between extreme beauty and decimation.

Information
October 7 to January 8
Thursday to Sunday: 12:00 to 18:00
Closed between December 23 and January 4
Tickets €8 / CJP/Rotterdampas/Friday evening €5
We are Public €0 (PIN ONLY)

Warning: This installation contains flashing images and may cause epileptic seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.