Sylvain Souklaye - Summer 2022 NEW WORK grantee
Sylvain Souklaye is a Brooklyn based French multi-modal artist. He is obsessed with sampling intimacies about people who don't belong to a determinate identity, gender, class, color or nationality. Sylvain Souklaye performances are a collage of individual memories which are relived for and via the audience. Self-taught, he began performing with vandalism in Lyon, and then intimate happenings, radio experimentation and action poetry. He later developed digital art installations using field recording techniques as a narrative layer while pursuing his writer’s path. Among his best known pieces are la blackline, a 5-year durational radio performance about socio-economic survival and urban absurdity, le déserteur a digital art installation dwelling on the notion of abandonment, TME a docudrama performance exploring self-inflicted amnesia and resilience and MIGRANT MARKET a remake of the slave market updated for the uber economy.
Sylvain Souklaye methods characteristically involve intense physical acts as well as the use of unsettling intimacy.
Be Happy or Die.
Be Happy or Die is a sonic installation that explores the consequence of digital dogma in a bodily disconnected state/region (Scandinavia) on minorities, outcasts, different bodies, and minds.
It is an electromagnetic field recording, a narrative orchestra that questions how happiness articulates our inner censorship regarding liberty and freedom.
A digital and tangible experience reflecting the current pandemic, especially our new collective behaviors. Can digitally engineered environments sonically and linguistically dictate our definition of reality and its morals and, in the long run, change our sensory interactions?
The performative aspect of this installation requires the audience to be at the center of an "academic" playground, surrounding it with pedagogical gamification tools used to decode our daily fight against the machines and the humans who control them. Experienceable in art spaces and at home, Be Happy or Dieseeks to engage with the most fragile segment of our automated digital ecosystem, putting activism directly into peoples' hands and minds.
Prospect Art wishes to thank the NEW WORK, Summer 2022 grant cycle judges for their generosity of time, intellect, spirit, and extraordinary participations:
Arit Emmanuela Etukudois is a Nigerian-American Moving Image Installation, Self-Portrait, and Performance Artist. Her practice deals with the fluidity and metamorphosis of Black identity. She uses transformative dreaming to explore the ontology, mysticism, history, and transcendental realities that live at the root of African existence. She earned her BA in Cinematic Arts from University of Maryland Baltimore county and her MFA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University. She also took an Erasmus at École Supérieure des Beaux-arts. She has exhibited in spaces such as New Art Exchange, UK; Art Share LA, USA; and Théâtre Paul Scarron, France. She currently lives and works in Baltimore MD and is an Adjunct Professor at Stevenson University.
"Reading through these applications I found that there is truly no shortage of talent and authenticity in the art world. There are so many artists out there doing the work and it was so good to see."
bree gant (b. 1989, she/they) is an artist and thinker from the west side of Detroit. They work across various forms to remark on the social forces that prevent folk from understanding how power affects everyday life. bree has held residencies and fellowships across the country with institutions like Surf Point Foundation, Kresge Arts in Detroit, Red Bull Arts, Art Matters, Talking Dolls Studio, and People in Education. bree studied film at Howard University, and is probably in a city park somewhere, dancing in the snow.
"It's such a gift to be able to witness and learn from the new, thoughtful ideas of fellow contemporary artists who are both innovating the gallery space and advancing social change."
Rokhsane Hovaida is an independent curator with a research focus on the relationship between digital culture and socially engaged practice. Previously, she has held positions in programming and communications at art institutions and galleries in the US and UK, where she has collectively organized over thirty exhibitions with a particular focus on community engagement and the digital experience. Rokhsane holds a MA in Curating the Contemporary from London Metropolitan University and a BS in Business Administration and Art History from San Diego State University. She is currently based in San Diego, California.