Disassembler
Maria Antelman

In Disassembler, Maria Antelman presents eight installation works across three floors of the Pioneer Works building. Antelman creates collage-like videos that pull from a well of sources, including scenarios about rewilding the American West, ideas of techno-animism, and early reconnaissance images from outer space. Crafted from unexpected juxtapositions, her often foreboding filmic compositions decode what it means to exist in a networks system.

In the third floor gallery, Antelman will debut the namesake video installation Disassembler, newly commissioned by Pioneer Works and co-produced by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). Titled after a computer tool that translates machine code into assembly language for humans to understand, the piece raises questions about the physical and psychological impact of automation processes on the individual and society. Disassembler confronts a post-automated experience, where bodies and gestures return to an organic, experiential world.

Additionally, five video sculptures will be exhibited in the second floor gallery, including The Wild West (2017), Stones Make The Rivers Move (2016), and Darth Vader (2014). As a whole, Antelman’s installations bring together the cerebral with the comic, and the alarming with the absurd in an attempt to suggest new meanings and raise new questions. Disassembler points toward the grasp of the unthinkable, the moment where our ability to reasonably understand reality collapses. The exhibition is accompanied by a new, Risograph-printed publication which bears text and imagery from the newly commissioned video, as part of Pioneer Works’ Mimo series.

About the Artist

Maria Antelman (b. 1971, Athens, Greece) is a video artist based in New York. She studied Art History at the Complutense University in Madrid and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been shown in recent exhibitions at Daata Editions; Marinaro Gallery, New York, NY; Videonale, Bonn, Germany; and Apex Art, New York, NY; The Agency, London, UK; and Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, Oregon. She has been awarded grants from the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation and residencies at ISCP and Pioneer Works, both in New York. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, Art Papers, Flash Art, zingmagazine, and artforum.com.

Maria Antelman: Disassembler is produced by the Onassis Foundation USA.

The work Disassembler is co-produced by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST).