Malevich.io are pleased to have partnered with Centre Pompidou, Swiss Institute, The Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, and König Galerie to present ‘Phase Shifting Index’, Jeremy Shaw’s first solo exhibition in France, opened on 25th February at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and travelling to Swiss Institute, New York, and The museum of old and new art later this year.

By introducing the project to our collector's board, Malevich.io was able to support the production of the show in exchange for an edition of the piece. Within our practice, we create an ecosystem beneficial for artists, museums, galleries and collectors. The 'Phase Shifting Index' exhibition by Jeremy Shaw is an example of a prolific collaboration.

Curated by Christine Marcel

CURATOR'S FOREWORD

Jeremy Shaw has pursued his artistic, audio and often immersive artistic work for more than fifteen years, following a period from 1996 to 2009 spent travelling throughout the world as a DJ with his Circlesquare project. It is obvious that those years are not unrelated to the very nature of his artistic work, where music and the sound dimension play an important role.

Shaw's practice is located at the intersection of several contemporary issues creating a stir in the world of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and the sciences, particularly the cognitive sciences and neuroscience, and lastly, the latest technological progress such as bio-nanotechnologies. His work stands out as an artistic and audio attempt to render an account of these multiple developments in research while projecting them into a fictional field that flirts with science fiction and alternative cultures.

PRESS RELEASE

Since the mid-2000s, the Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw (born in 1977, based in Berlin) has established an original artistic approach that combines sources of inspiration ranging from spiritual beliefs to neuroscience. His fascination with the scientific progress around the human mind and the mechanisms of perception is coupled with an interest in subcultures and techno culture.

Jeremy Shaw presents at the Centre Pompidou his first major museum exhibition in France with a new immersive project, “Phase Shifting Index”, which follows his trilogy “Quantification Trilogy”, of which the Centre Pompidou acquired the video “Liminals” in 2017, previously presented at the Venice Biennale in 2017. At the entrance, the visitor discovers kaleidoscopic prism object containing archival photographs showing images of religious or festive transes subjected to a fragmentation process. In addition to these photographs produced for the exhibition, Jeremy Shaw specially designed a large installation for the “Galerie 3” of the Centre Pompidou.The piece consists of seven video screens showing groups of dancers performing ritual and cathartic movements until they synchronize in a moment of collective ecstasy on a single sound and visual tape. The music, first medium of this artist who was a famous DJ and recorded under the name of Circlesquare, plays an important part in this vast choreography. The dancers’ faces are then distorted on the screens by using a computer graphics tool. Confronting rational and spiritual aspirations in a posthuman future, the video installation “Phase Shifting Index” bewitches as it frightens, dissolving the limits of image and sound, exciting the viewer’s perceptive nerves shared between ecstasy and self-ascended fear.

The Centre Pompidou has joined forces with the Swiss Institute, New York, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) and Dark Mofo, Hobart, Tasmania and the Frankfurter Kunstverein to co-produce the film presented in the exhibition and show it in three different forms, from February 2020 at the Centre Pompidou, then in April at the Swiss Institute (2 April-14 June 2020), and finally in June at Mona (6 June 2020-5 April 2021). The Centre Pompidou and the Swiss Institute have co-edited the artist’s first complete monograph, published in French and English.

PHASE SHIFTING INDEX (2020)

Humanities innate need for meaning has often centered around these communal practices, be it in a temple, an art gallery, a shared meal, or in the case of Phase Shifting Index (2020) the age-old phenomenon of dance. Regardless of religion, geography or social order, human society has always held a place for ritual and dance, offering a language so universal, so intrinsically human, that it defies both reason and the need for understanding. It wordless expresses our emotions, our passions, our beliefs and, in essence, our very identity. Cults, subcultures and ritualistic practices from past, present and future are depicted across seven screens as a narrator from 100 years ahead looks back on our future as their past. As the show progresses, the films slowly grow into one another, merging into a unified explosion of light, sound and synchronized dance, drawn together in a final mind-bending transformation; taking the viewer into a profoundly physical state of trance.

Shaw’s fascination with the future of man’s marriage to machine is in full evidence here. He seeks out the potentials for overlap between science and spirituality, seamlessly interweaving the organic with the artificial to create a unique vision of religious reverence and humanistic transcendence. Phase Shifting Index shows how the dangers we now face from ever more addictive, intrusive and often isolating technologies can not only be overcome, but used to our advantage. Shaw utilizes technology to unwittingly draw the audience into a state of near primal collective experience of music, movement and sound. The piece offers both a warning and a solution, encouraging the viewer to question the potential consequence of technologies ability to raise humanity above its own nature, yet seeing in our creations a glimpse of something innately spiritual. As mankind has sought unity with God and spirit throughout our long and storied history, so too must we now seek unity with the technology, bridging the gap between the organic and the artificial in order to find the divine.