A.K. Burns: Artist in Residence 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 is currently developing 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.