Abstract

Everything is broken. We have become lethargic, complacent, consumptive, elegiac: completely disenchanted. Through multi-disciplinary visual art work, Zurkow seeks to explore enchantment and haunting as a way of challenging and changing our environmental relations. Citing influences such as science studies philosopher Bruno Latour, ecocrotic Timothy Morton, and social scientist Jane Bennett, for her RPI presentation Zurkow will frame several recent art projects that explore human entanglement with non-human/animal agents. In order to question common perceptions of friends and enemies, and the environmental polemics that still centralize the human/nature split, Zurkow explores topics such as invasive species, hydrocarbons, and thelivestock/predator conflict on Western United States public lands. Zurkow’s works include Heraldic Crests for Invasive Species, The PetroleumManga, Gila 2.0: Warding Off the Wolf, the Mesocosm series of 144-hour long animated ecosystems, and associated performative and participatory food events that bring research and mediated materials more intimately to one’s senses.

Bio

Crossing multiple disciplines with her practice, Marina Zurkow builds animations and participatory environments that are centered on humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. Engaging audiences using film and video, sculpture, print graphics and public interventions, Zurkow’s work is by turns humorous and contemplative. Through the experience of her projects it is clear that nature has long been a stage upon which we project ourselves, making ourselves other.

In 2011 a solo exhibition of Zurkow’s work was featured at the Montclair Art Museum. Past exhibitions of her work have also been featured at FACT, Liverpool; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wave Hill, New York; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Bennington College, Vermont; Borusan Collection, Istanbul; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon; Marian Spore, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Creative Time, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; Eyebeam, New York; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is represented by bitforms gallery in New York.

Marina Zurkow is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is on faculty at ITP at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.