NIKE SPORTSWEAR DESIGN DIRECTION

Throughout seven seasons as Global Design Director at Nike, I guided the Sportswear team in shifting campaign art direction away from traditional street photography to a hybrid image space where photography co-exists with illustration, graphics, and three-dimensional imagery. In essence, film photography was replaced with hyperreal image compositions. As part of this effort, I introduced and advocated for a different class of creative partners for NSW. Candidates and collaborators included: Justinas Vilutis, Ada Sokol, Maxime Guyon, David Brandon Geeting, Culturesport, Kasper-Florio, and Timothy Luke. Nike Sportswear is the company's lifestyle category. Where other categories are concerned with sport and performance, Sportswear is concerned with youth culture and fashion. For many years the creative strategy was to utilize street style photography to communicate authenticity. At the same time, Nike has never shied away from heroic storytelling when it comes to their athletes. If the company could make Charles Barkley wrestle with Godzilla, why should Sportswear be any different? This was an attempt to bridge that divide between lifestyle and performance—to inject the heroic ideal in everyday life and culture. Nike Sportswear Global Brand Design Team: Senior Creative Director: Serifcan Ozcan (2018–2019), Everett Vangsnes (2019) Design Director: Eric Hu Art Directors: Andre Simmons (2018–2019), Dawn Yawnagihara (2019) Senior Designer: Dawn Yawnagihara (2018) Designer II: Claire Kang, Jake Gevalt Designer I: Miyu Shirotsuka

“My books have always, to some extent, contained ideas for installations and works […]. Pieces in the exhibition become materializations of words, and some of the words in this book are a dematerialization of objects in the exhibition.” — Douglas Coupland, introduction to Bit Rot, 2015

The skin of the earth is a digital test pattern and, like a cave painting, these are the primitive markings of a new culture firmly on the rise.

—I Spy with My Machine Eye

11:00 am describes and shows the weekly appointments between Alfons and photographer Titus Simoens. Alfons is an 81-year-old man who lives in Ghent, close to the house of Simoens. From October 2017 till May 2018 Simoens visited Alfons every week at 11:00 am. They talked and told stories. Simoens wrote down Alfons’s stories and photographed him during his visits. Alfons decided to cook for Simoens every time he payed him a visit. It became their weekly ritual.

Next to writing down Alfons’s stories and collecting photographs, Simoens also questioned his position as a photographer and documenter. How the development proceeds of a project like this. How a story develops. How the photographer deals with the notion of ‘a story’ and how he portrays characters in that same story. What is objective and what is subjective? Under which condition is a story fiction and when a documentary approach is considered ?

11:00 am is a multi-layered project, that provokes the reader and viewer to question the meaning of a story. It discusses the position of a photographer when creating new work. It considers ones perception of another ones life, the continuous projection that people pursue when meeting someone new.

—TItus Simoens

Five years ago, Antoinette Nausikaä decided she wanted to observe mountains. In the middle of her frantic urban life she developed a need for stillness and solitude, and she was convinced that mountains were the place to go.

Soon however, she discovered that ‘pure’ silence and solitude were nowhere to be found. Looking for the timeless spirit of the mountains, she found fleeting traces of human existence everywhere.

She lived and worked on and around eight ancient mountains in Europe and Asia, each one of them a sacred icon and a pilgrimage destination. She travelled to Mount Fuji (JP), Olympus (GR), Ararat (TR) and the five most sacred mountains in China, the Wǔyuè. She observed them, climbed them, photographed, made drawings and dug in the earth for clay to make small sculptures.

And so, almost casually, her quest developed into an investigation and presentation of one of the most pressing philosophical themes of this moment: the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, as interpreted by many authoritative contemporary philosophers, deals with the idea that man and nature are fundamentally separated. An idea that is a typical product of nineteenth-century Romanticism, but is now considered to be out-of-dates. After all, our human presence is omnipresent, visible even in the geographical layers of the Earth.

—Antoinette Nausikaä

Portikus is pleased to present Model Malady, an exhibition by Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat (*1975, lives and works in Berlin). Within his artistic practice, the artist uses means and ways to steer or interrupt the contemplative gaze, thereby directing the focus on the unheeded, the unsolicited. To achieve this, the artist resorts to various media such as video, photography and sculpture.

The core of his upcoming exhibition Model Malady at Portikus is composed of two new works: Present Sore(2016) and Chômage Technique (2016).

Present Sore is a video work, a composite portrait of the 21st-century body mediated by substances both organic and fabricated. Commissioned by Portikus and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, it is temporarily streamed on the Walker Online Channel, and will now be presented as an installation in Frankfurt. In Present Sore, we see the human body not as a whole, but only in detail—like a close-up of the knee or the hand. The focus is on fragments, showing the mechanical moving “parts” of the body and isolating their function as tools.

Chômage Technique is a new group of sculptures that Nashat created for Portikus and the forthcoming Walker exhibition. Consisting of plinths resting on lounging display structures that the artist says are designed for them to “relax”, those obsolete pedestals have no artwork or body to support anymore. They become like laid-off workers, with complimentary front row seating for Present Sore, so that they can enjoy watching the video and its digital depiction of the bodies they would once have supported.

—Shahryar Nashat

Regarding digital video as a kind of prosthesis or extension of the physical body, Shahryar Nashat moves between forms, often making reference to classical sculpture, art history, and popular culture as the basis of his source material. He is intent on staging a multisensory encounter with both images and objects, and there is something decidedly fetishistic in his approach, which implicates the act of viewing and delineates the encounter between viewers and objects in the shared space of exhibitions. Subjects that approximate the relationships between the physical body and its translation into film, video, sculpture, and photography include fissures, tears, splits, and ruptures. Brought together, these visual clues reflect on the limits of the body and the limits of representation in equal measure.

In Hard Up for Support (2016), Nashat pairs a carved and polished pink marble polygon with a new video that both suggests and denies bodily presence. Whether it is through the digital playback of high-resolution video or the faux-marble pattern on accompanying benches that are part of the overall scenography of the installation, the works share a preoccupation with surface, skin, and the layers that signify the interior and exterior of the body. As part of an ongoing study in the confrontation between static objects, mute images, and the viewers that behold them, Nashat’s works are “hard up” for attention, eliciting desire through the innate classicism of marble alongside today’s high-definition relationships of images.

—Shahryar Nashat

My photographic work develops around a single series, called Gravity and Grace . It brings together a set of images whose production began in 2013.

By borrowing the title of the collection of the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) I wanted to focus my series on the relationship to the model and more broadly to the photographic image. All revolve around a mise-en-scène work that is the starting point of each photograph. For me, the image is as much a documentation of these situations as the very justification of their existence. This ambiguity between the document and the autonomous image is a way of approaching the issues of the relation to the subject. Whether friends, family, unknowns, objects or spaces, this does not matter: the mise-en-scene builds the frame in which the subject is forced to become an image.

Since 2015 I realize a large majority of my images where I live and work in Argenteuil. The recurrence of the same space, its repetition of images in images, allows me to study the different layers that organize and are superimposed in my photographs: the underlying idea that constitutes the center of the image lies in a recognizable decoration whose structure and organization are independent of the photographic act. The contrast or contradictions that can then arise affirm what depends or not the staging in the image.

My photographs are always between their potential autonomy and their necessary inscription in a set that constantly redefines their place. The organization of my images on this site is done according to the months of the year (all together) during which they were made. They form series of photographs that communicate with each other in porous categories. My work is organized as a background image in which to build and rebuild sets.

—Hubert Crabieres

Aram Bartholl’s work creates an interplay between internet, culture and reality. How do our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? Bartholl asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work and his public interventions and installations, often entailing surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world, challenge our concepts of reality and incorporeality.

—Aram Bartholl

There is something fundamentally athletic about Fukunaga’s directorial approach, the idea that with enough practice, research and experience, mastery becomes indistinguishable from instinct.

—NYT on Fukunaga

Based in Paris since 2016, Dreams Office provides both print and digital graphic design services. With a work method described as "a precise and functional movement towards progress" and from its typographic and photographic know-how, the office creates surfaces, objects, images, characters, tools and systems. custom graphics.

—Dreams Office

5 min, 1h, tonight, tomorrow...(Remind me later)

Installation, 120 x 150 x 160 cm Glass table, chair, keyboard & mouse, UV light

Aram Bartholl’s work questions how our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? He asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work in general. The dichotomies brought about by these disconnects explored though the replacement of the computer monitor with the UV face tanning light serve as a reflection on our changing and increasingly automating daily routines and pass-times.

His public interventions and installations, along with “5 min, 1h, tonight, tomorrow…(Remind me later)” often entail surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world and challenge our concepts of reality and incorporeality.

—Aram Bartholl

A video installation using iconic images from Hollywood feature films to explore representations of Lower Manhattan in popular culture. Simultaneous juxtapositions of establishing shots (the orientating panoramic shot which precedes a scene) on three adjacent flat screens reveals how the identity of Manhattan became linked to success—often financial—and how the gaze of a character toward the World Trade Center (once a symbol of longing, of dreams and aspirations) now becomes a meditation on the uncanny, disorientation, absence and nostalgia.

—Amie Siegel

The subject of interest of Lempert’s work – animal life – is complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image, as revealed in its developing and printing processes. While seemingly serendipitous, Lempert nevertheless pursues a very clear goal and aesthetic. His is a very careful, subtle world.

—Carvalho Bernau

In Urbanities, a group show at James Fuentes Gallery, black and white gelatin silver prints taken at the painter Dan Colen’s farm in upstate New York depict what could be a photograph from the distant agrarian past. In reality it is an image of the agrarian only accessible via the capital success (or total rejection of it) of a city dwelling artist.

—About Dena Yago