A.K. Burns: Shabby But Thriving at the New Museum

A.K. Burns will be the artist-in-residence through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Spring R&D Season: BODY. Using science fiction as a point of departure, Burns has developed a cycle of works and installations that draws on theater, Surrealism, philosophy, and ecological anxieties. The work is serial and organized around five elements: power (the sun), water, land, body, and the void. The larger project reorients the audience within a speculative present. A Smeary Spot (2015), the opening episode, was shot in both the desert and a black box theater; it serves as an introduction into a parallel cosmology where aspects move or flow, are controlled, measured, used, or cared for, raising larger questions about how value is allocated and perceived. In her forthcoming commission for the New Museum, Burns will continue this series, staging an in-process, video-based installation that reworks the subject—and thereby subjugation—of the body. Burns’ exhibition and residency will include a series of public programs exploring the body’s relationship to law and the environment, including a day-long event about rights under the Trump administration on Sunday, February 5, which will feature information sessions with lawyers and grassroots organizers on five issues: civil disobedience and protest, healthcare, policing and prisons, environmental contamination, and immigration. The exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator