Vivian Vivas: may I die before I’m gone

July 10-August 22, 2024

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Alexander Berggruen is pleased to announce our first video exhibition with experimental filmmaker Vivian Vivas. We will be presenting her 2023-2024 film may I die before I’m gone. This exhibition will open Wednesday, July 10, 2024 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).

Vivian Vivas’s film may I die before I’m gone is a meditation on our collective unconscious and communal grieving for Nature. Her exploration of the psychological landscape of the afterlife (a continuous cycle of death and rebirth) manifests in symbolic language that reveals the soul’s struggle between pain and pleasure, survival and celebration. On the edge of the Patagonian wilderness, she blurs the border between individual mourning and our awareness of the threat, at our own hands, of extinction. The work subtly delves into non-human perspectives to frame ecological questions. Are we wild or domesticated; is this distinction arbitrary, or connected to subjective expressions of alienation and freedom? Presented in the gallery on a wall built of LED screens, Vivas’s video includes select scenes that act as what she calls “emotional doors” to deep feelings that enable a change in perspective.

As the film runs on a loop with no beginning or end, a viewer encounters the video much like they encounter another living being. The artist offers fragmented glimpses into a cycle of quiet grief, highlighting the poetic beauty that can emerge from suffering. Here, pleasure and raw indulgence are counterparts to pain. Conjuring drama with fantastical interpretations of death, not unlike Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, Vivas captures the collision of our contemporary moment with centuries-old rituals, dystopian futures, and imagined afterlives. At this intersection is a biological drive for ecstasy. Through Vivas’s visceral visual language, luscious red cherries become as graphic as a lamb carcass. The moving images, all in slow motion, ignite tactile sensations as she presents swaying grass, rushing water, and tender caresses between performers.

Installation view of Vivian Vivas: may I die before I'm gone (July 10-August 22, 2024) at Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo Daniel Greer

Installation view of Vivian Vivas, may I die before I’m gone (still), 2023-2024, high resolution digital color video, multi-channel sound, 32 mins 58 secs, Edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proof.

To make may I die before I’m gone, Vivas traveled to San Martin de los Andes, a Patagonian town surrounded by volcanic lakes that birthed some of the continent’s first life. Even today, the rich iron soil lifts into the air, a mix of nostalgia and mysticism, with each footstep. While a viewer is left to observe the physical and metaphorical burden of the characters, they are also encouraged to reflect on that which they are personally carrying. Through feeling and intuition, Vivas translates the personal to the universal. To empathize with Nature, she invites a viewer to consider nonhuman viewpoints of the flora and fauna. Her work prods at the uncanny competing embodiments of the wild in the environment and in humans. Wild environments offer thriving spaces for plants to grow freely and animals to lead unobstructed lives, but with technological developments, humankind can go too far by exploiting Nature’s resources beyond necessity. Vivas’s video portrays humans at our emotion-driven core grappling with contradictory forces. She does so with an exploration of connection and separation: between the performers, between the performers and their psyche, between the performers and other animals, and between the performers and the earth. In the vein of Collective Rewilding, may I die before I’m gone suggests transcendence through finding community with all biotic forces and the kind of love that gives space for Nature to restore to its self-sustaining ecology (1).

Vivas proposes a post human-centric system of care emerging from the transformative power of crisis. may I die before I’m gone reflects the vulnerability and fragility of life, holding a dying man and ecology in her arms in the hopes of rebirth. Speaking about her exploration of grief, she stated: “And yet there is beauty found in everything, an aesthetic even to that which causes pain, and it is precisely that beauty that holds a person captive, unable to look away, and provides a path, as experience, for the artist, and hopefully, the audience, to move forward.” Ascribing one’s sense of identity not to their name and origin, but rather to their desires and shifting senses of purpose in life, she claims the transformative experiences of pain can lead one to be rebirthed into a new person—what Jungian psychology refers to as psychic death. In may I die before I’m gone, Vivas provides the architecture to open portals to the psyche, afterlife, spiritual realms, Nature’s life force, and revival.

(1) Sara Garzón, “Cur(at)ing for a Broken World: The Case for Collective Rewilding,” Protocinema, Istabul, New York, Bankok, 6-9, 2021.

Press release by Kirsten Cave.

Vivan Vivas in the studio, New York, NY, 2024.

About the Artist

Vivian Vivas received an MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Moving Image from Columbia University and a BFA in Film and Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). She previously studied Photography at the Andy Goldstein School of Creative Photography in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Notably, Vivas was a finalist for the 2022 Frankenthaler Climate Award and received the 2018 Kodak Award from SFAI. The artist held a recent solo show at Dilalica Gallery in Barcelona (part of the Loop Festival video art circuit) and was included in group shows at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL, and at Root Division, San Francisco, CA. Recent performances include ARTefACTe 2023 in Barcelona and the John Giorno Octopus Series at Performance Space in New York. Her work was showcased in: In Response: Jonas Mekas at the Jewish Museum in New York, Summer Salon at Half Gallery in New York, Between the Self and its True Home at the UCLA New Wight International Biennial in Los Angeles, and High Beams No.6 Convoy at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. Vivas is a Latin American artist who lives and works in New York, NY. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Vivian Vivas: may I die before I’m gone will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from July 10-August 22, 2024. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.

Press

Color Theory: Artist Anna Kunz Uses the Power of Pigment to Spark Emotion

LUXE INTERIORS + DESIGN

For Chicago-based painter Anna Kunz, color never sits still. “In a composition, it moves and vibrates,” she says. “It’s alive and engaging—the opposite of static.”

The artist, whose aesthetic forebears include such people as Robert Irwin and Josef Albers, learned about color’s emotive powers early in life. Her father worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, where a young Kunz often waited for him while parked in front of Mark Rothko’s shimmering Untitled (Purple, White, and Red). “I observed how some people laughed, some got angry and others wept,” she recalls. “At 7 years old, I didn’t know color would be my lifelong pursuit—but I saw its potential to evoke a response.”

Today, Kunz—who divides her studio time between the Austin neighborhood and rural Michigan—is known for making viewers rethink the hues they take for granted with works on paper, canvas and textiles. “I enjoy fairly simple geometric forms because I am interested in pigments being perceived first,” she says, noting that color can affect everything from our heartbeats to our circulatory systems. She also explores how the perception of a particular hue depends on its surroundings. “Albers put it perfectly,” says Kunz, paraphrasing the 20th-century German American artist: “No one color is true—it is only determined by its relation to another color.”

In Kunz’s Austin studio, smaller works on paper are arrayed on countertops while larger canvases are spread on the floor. She moves between them via wooden planks in a kind of dance, painting to the sounds of experimental music. “My process is generative—I consider everything as part of a continuum,” says Kunz, who applies oils with a brush and acrylics with objects plucked from the domestic realm—spatulas, hairbrushes, bits of fabric, curlers—as well as found items, like leaves. “And I use a lot of water, because I like to dissolve hard-edged boundaries,” she adds. Kunz builds a rich depth of color by layering multiple thin films of pigment. She works with only a couple of different hues in a given day, assigning each one its own specific task: “For example, I might want my red to feel submissive in one piece and more dominant in another,” the artist explains. “I use colors like characters to satisfy different formal problems.”

Kunz, who has an upcoming solo show at New York’s Alexander Berggruen gallery in May and a group show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective in July, knows a painting is finished when it starts to take on a life of its own and feels unexpected—“like a surprise,” she describes. “When I sense light emitting from the color, I feel I’ve created a kind of optimism, and that’s when it’s time to leave it alone.”

Cara Nahaul: Tender Island

Cara Nahaul: Tender Island was published on the occasion of the gallery’s eponymous exhibition, which will run from April 10-May 8, 2024. This catalogue features a foreword by Kirsten Cave and an interview between Cara Nahaul and writer, editor, and curator Anneka French, which took place in February 2024.

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