Desert X, the recurring site-specific, international art exhibition, opens its fourth edition at sites across the Coachella Valley, California. The exhibition is free and open to all and will remain on view through May 7, 2023.
Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curator Diana Campbell, the exhibition will activate the desert landscape through 12 installations by artists from Europe, North America and South Asia, whose poetic and immersive works span sculpture, painting, photography, writing, architecture, design, film, music, performance and choreography, education, and environmental activism.
Participating artists:
RANA BEGUM
b. Sylhet, Bangladesh, 1977
Based in London, United Kingdom
No.1225 Chainlink
74184 Portola Road, Palm Desert
33.775917, -116.368694
Rana Begum is a British-Bangladeshi artist whose work blurs boundaries between painting, sculpture, design and architecture. She is influenced by both minimalism and her childhood experiences encountering spiritual architecture in Bangladesh. She combines an early childhood sense of calm contemplation that she found in repetition and ritual with a fascination for urban structures and industrial materials to create a conversation between form, color and light. Her works absorb and reflect varied densities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial, with a unique style of rhyming geometry and color.
Responding to the ubiquity of the chain-link fence as a pattern spread across the Coachella Valley — a material that is meant to protect but also carries associations of violence — Begum diffuses the material’s role as a divider through her manipulation of its form and color. We notice how light and air, sand and water, as well as people, can filter through her cloud-like pavilion, which offers paths of expansive escape rather than reductive confinement. Constantly changing with the movement of the sun and the visitors inside of it, the work emphasizes that nothing in life is static; everything, from the world outside to our emotions within, is in a continual state of flux.
LAUREN BON AND METABOLIC STUDIO
(b. New Haven, Connecticut, USA, 1962)
Based in Los Angeles, California
The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart
2249 N. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs
33.849977, -116.549802
Open select evenings.
Check desertx.org or the Desert X app for visiting hours.
Lauren Bon is an artist whose practice embraces environmental activism. Working with architecture, performance, photography, sound and farming, she creates urban, public and land art that she terms “devices of wonder” to galvanize social and political transformation. For Bon, infrastructure to regenerate life and reveal its abundance can be art. In 2005, Bon created Metabolic Studio. Derived from the Greek word for “change,” metabolism is the process that maintains life. In continuous cycles of creation and destruction, metabolism transforms nutrients into energy and form. The actions generated by Metabolic Studio are global in focus and reach: developing new tools for urban living and city planning; inventing novel social practices for political and environmental justice; and directing art practice to engage on the same scale as society’s capacity to destroy. Metabolic Studio is a force for change, showing that another reality is possible by pointing the way to new endeavors and practices in an age of economic and environmental scarcity.
Bon and Metabolic Studio have created a poetic object that submerges visitors in the deep past and the distant future, taking inspiration from plants, which metabolize sunlight into energy, and the blue whale, the largest animal known to have lived on Earth. Fueling the potential for future life and visually transforming itself in the process, the work, which merges swimming pools in a landscape associated with tremendous water shortage, with water and fish-bone skeleton “sand” from the Salton Sea, reminds us not only of the imperative for artists to create at the same level as society’s capacity to destroy, but also of our own connection to water and that the desert was once a sea. A lace-like steel sculpture of a to-scale blue whale heart is submerged in a pool pumped full of Salton-Sea water, but rather than stand as a harbinger of death, the sculpture metabolizes and creates energy and clean water that it deposits back into the atmosphere, fueling the potential for future life across the run of the exhibition and visually transforming itself in the process.
GERALD CLARKE
b. Hemet, California, USA, 1967
Based on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation
Immersion
James O. Jessie Desert Highland Unity Center
480 W. Tramview Road, Palm Springs
33.868051, -116.553720
Gerald Clarke is an artist, university professor, cowboy and Cahuilla tribal leader. He is known for deriving inspiration from his heritage and expressing traditional ideas in contemporary forms — mixed-media sculptures, paintings, works on paper, videos, performances and installations — that are at once poetic and politically urgent. Clarke’s artistic output resonates with histories of assemblage, pop, and conceptual art produced by both Native and non-Native artists.
As an educator, Clarke understands the role that games can play in leading people to obtaining knowledge that they might have been hesitant to seek on their own. Employing the language of traditional Cahuilla basket weaving and American board games, the artist creates a monumental sculpture of a gameboard in the desert that immerses visitors in the natural and cultural history of Native Americans in the Coachella Valley. Catalyzing active learning, the maze-like structure invites visitors to walk on it and move according to instructions driving a game of cards, rewarding the player with new ways of viewing and understanding the landscape.
PALOMA CONTRERAS LOMAS
b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1991 Based in Mexico City
Amar a Dios en Tierra de Indios, Es Oficio Maternal
Sunnylands Center & Gardens
37977 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage
33.780500, -116.406167
Visit desertx.org for opening hours.
By employing drawing, sculpture, performance, writing and multimedia installation, Paloma Contreras Lomas addresses topics such as patriarchy, violence, class segregation, colonial guilt and constructed middle-class identity with a cinematic sense of humor. She exercises a playful sense of lightness to draw the viewer in to ponder heavy issues that are rarely addressed in Mexican society. Her work seeks to push back at the violent male gaze of the landscape by confronting its historical association with the male libido, the occupation and instrumentalization of territory, and economies of extraction.
Visitors encounter a dated car that has screeched to a halt in Sunnylands. An absurd array of tangled limbs of two mysterious characters wearing long hats sprawl out of the car and onto the site’s pristine, manicured grounds. Plush, long hands armed with soft-stuffed guns hang from the windows, barely camouflaged by the artificial overgrowth invading the sculpture. These strange characters accompany the visitor on a caricature of a western–meets–sci-fi audio-visual tour of the landscape, like a fictional tour of a seemingly familiar world outside, guided by aliens and ghosts.
TORKWASE DYSON
b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1973
Based in New York
Liquid A Place
Homme Adams Park
72500 Thrush Road, Palm Desert
33.708547, -116.399372
Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives. She seeks to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies, recognizing that many landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments were actively shaped to devalue Black life.
Liquid A Place is part of an ongoing series that started from the premise that we are the water in the room, inviting viewers to consider their bodily interconnection with rivers and oceans that surround us. After all, around 60 percent of our bodies and 70 percent of the planet is water, and these waters circulate across our bodies and the planet as they shift states from solid to liquid to gas.
For this iteration of Liquid A Place, Dyson creates a monumental sculpture that is a poetic meditation connecting the memory of water in the body and the memory of the water in the desert. How do we go to the water in our bodies to harvest memory? Can this liquid memoryhelp us reconsider scale and distance as critical forms in holding onto liberatory life practices? What kind of scalable infrastructure can our bodies resist and invent, making cities more livable? How are new geographies formed from the architecture of our bodies?
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES
b. Monclova, Mexico, 1975
Based in Mexico City and Los Angeles
Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium)
Pierson Boulevard between Foxdale Drive and Miracle Hill Road, Desert Hot Springs
33.963394, -116.485582
Works by Mario García Torres are inspired by history and the histories of art, which he takes as factual raw material for new narrations, giving famous artworks and cultural icons fresh twists through a variety of media, including painting, photography, film, video, performance and installation. Storytelling, reenactment, report and repetition are few of the strategies García Torres employs in his work, uncovering narratives that highlight the limitation of evidence and the subjectivity of historical records. Attached to the historical settings of his projects, his works bridge past and present by raising awareness about recorded knowledge and excluded content, which often reveal the nature of memory.
The desert is a beautiful and attractive — yet also a dangerous and challenging — place. Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) carries a reflection on “cowboy culture” that exists across both Mexican and American borders, representative of a macho, self-aggrandizing and forceful control of nature. These qualities also relate to the history of art, especially in the American West. In cowboy culture, and also in land art, there is an asserted promise to harness/control nature, which carries a pronounced risk of failure. In bull-riding, whether with a live animal or its mechanical avatar, competition with a wild beast carries an interest in and celebration of failure. The rider will fail and fall. A cowboy will become a clown. In his installation for Desert X, the artist replaced the bull component of the mechanical bull with a flat, geometric, reflective surface, slowing down the machine’s movement to reveal, little by little, what this object really is. Placed in the middle of the desert, in the formation ofa herd, the work leads us to contemplate the “wild West,” and our relationship to landscape and our role within it; our condition to be both attracted and replaced by failure.
HYLOZOIC/DESIRES
Founded 2016, based between London and Delhi
Himali Singh Soin (b. Delhi, India, 1987)
David Soin Tappeser (b. Bonn, Germany, 1985)
Namak Nazar
Worsley Road between Pierson and Mission Lakes Boulevards
Desert Hot Springs 33.965665, -116.583173
Hylozoic/Desires, or h/d, comprises Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser, a multimedia poet-musician duo whose work centers around the rhythms of love and the beat of belonging. h/d’s methodology involves research into place and history to develop new speculative futures utilizing the musical tradition of jazz and the literary tradition of poetry. Their practice centers around ideas of time, interdependence and alterity. Their works use rhythm to codify, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time and hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference. h/d uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy.
For Desert X, they find this metaphor in salt. Inspired by the proliferation of conspiracies — UFOlogists, Scientologists, cybernetic spiritualists, Area 51, flat-earthers, lizard people and chemtrails — h/d has created a wooden pillar that branches into loudspeakers that spew an imaginary conspiracy theory about Namak Nazar, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward. The particle appears to climb up and crystalize over the trunk of the pole, connecting the salt found in the stories from the loudspeaker to the physical desert landscape, where salt lines forecast droughts and floods to come and salt songs describe the sacred geometry of the desert before settler colonialism.
Visitors are invited to join h/d in thinking through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love in their immersive audio-visual environment.
MATT JOHNSON
b. New York, USA, 1978
Based in Los Angeles
Sleeping Figure
I-10 Exit 110 to Railroad Ave
33.922876, -116.689379
Renowned for his wry marriages of everyday subjects with raw physical matter, Matt Johnson’s sculptures explore the paradox of visual forms through unorthodox and surprising materials. Whether rendering concentric Hula Hoops in steel to resemble nuclear diagrams or plastic beer cups in painted bronze, Johnson’s sculptures point not only to the gestural potential of consumer experience, but to the primitive connection humans have to materiality.Recently focusing on wood carvings of crumpled objects of refuse, Johnson’s painstaking renderings of crushed boxes, broken Styrofoam pads and smashed plastic present tossed-off remnants of everyday life as sublime formalism.
Sleeping Figure might be a cubist rendition of a classical odalisque, except here the cubes are shipping containers belonging to the globalized movement of goods and trade. Conceived at the time when a Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, German-managed, Panamanian-flagged and Indian- manned container behemoth found itself for six days under Egyptian jurisdiction while blocking the Suez Canal, Johnson’s figure speaks to the crumples and breaks of a supply chain economy in distress. Situated along the main artery connecting the Port of Los Angeles to the inland United States, the sculpture gains local relevance from the recently approved siting of distribution centers in the north of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs. Casual and laconic, it overlooks the landscape reminding us that the invisible hand of globalism now connected to its container body has come to rest in the Coachella Valley.
TYRE D. NICHOLS
b. Sacramento, CA, 1993
d. Memphis, TN, January 10, 2023
Originals
N. Gene Autry Trail, Between Via Escuela and the I-10
33.852444, -116.506083
Born and raised in Sacramento California, Tyre Nichols’ photographs of landscapes, sunsets, monuments and the architectural vernaculars of his adopted town of Memphis, Tennessee are the unassuming documents of a young man whose eye was drawn to the moments of beauty and evanescence that shape the rituals of daily life. “My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens,” he wrote. “I hope to one day let people see what I see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work.”
This work, now celebrated as part of Desert X, represents not just a vision that was brutally denied the opportunity to develop but the potential of all those individuals whose lives have been lost to the state sanctioned violence of institutional racism. Sited on billboards along Gene Autry Trail, Nichols’ work is also a reminder that so many of these needless deaths take place at the side of the road. Here the silent beauty of these levitated images stands in stark contrast with the terror experienced by Nichols and so many others on the shoulder below. But as with the vision the message is also one of hope: hope that with restrictions on pretextual stops California can lead the way in police reform; hope that together we can create a just society in which the fragile and beautiful talents of the likes of Tyre Nichols can flourish and grow.
TSCHABALALA SELF
b. Harlem, New York, USA, 1990
Based in New York
Pioneer
San Gorgonio Street and Bubbling Wells Road, Desert Hot Springs
33.940884, -116.483980
Tschabalala Self’s work is concerned with the iconographic significance of the Black female body in contemporary culture. Her work explores the emotional, physical and psychological impact of the Black female body as icon and is primarily devoted to examining the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality. Collective fantasies surround the Black body and have created a cultural niche in which exists our contemporary understanding of Black femininity. Her practice is dedicated to naming this phenomenon. Pioneer is a monument built in homage to the collective foremothers of contemporary America.
Placed in the California desert, Pioneer exists as a figure that is simultaneously born out the historical event of America’s creation and one that has an ephemeral quality, untethered by any moment in time. The desert often references both the beginning and the end. Pioneer similarly represents the lost, expelled and forgotten Indigenous, Native and African women whose bodies and labor allowed for American expansion and growth, while also standing as a beacon of resilience for their descendants — a visual representation of their birthright and place within the American landscape. The sculpture celebrates flexibility of the divine feminine spirit and form and the fluidity of identity in contemporary America. It is a reminder that even in the desert, we are born from water. Placed within a palm oasis of the desert, Pioneer poses the question: Does it only rain on wet land?
MARINA TABASSUM
b. Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1968
Based in Dhaka
Khudi Bari
View the film at desertx.org
Architect Marina Tabassum has established an aesthetic language that is contemporary to the world yet rooted to the place. She rejects the global pressure of consumer architecture, a fast breed of buildings that are out of place and context, and pledges to root her designs to the place informed by its climate and geography. She engages in extensive research on the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, working closely with geographers, landscape architects, planners and other allied professionals. Her work also extends to the marginalized ultra-low-income population of the country with a goal to elevate the environmental and living conditions of all people. Her process-based practice model is internationally regarded as a model.
Tabassum’s Khudi Bari (Bengali for “tiny house”) is an example of a modular mobile home that, in Bangladesh, is inexpensive, durable, and relatively quick and easy to assembled and disassembled with minimum labor, taking advantage of a rigid space- frame structure to save goods and lives in the wake of flash floods on tiny “desert islands” of sand known as “chars” that precariously dot across the Bengal delta. Land is fluid on the floodplains of Bangladesh, and these islands often break off and erode into the water, forcing people to physically move their home. Khudi Bari reminds us to look to locally rooted knowledge to innovate solutions for uncertain futures. Desert X has commissioned a film about the project in which Tabassum addresses dry and wet cultures and the role of design in enabling life in some of the world’s most extreme climate conditions.
HÉCTOR ZAMORA
b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1974
Based in Mexico City
Chimera
Check the Desert X app or desertx.org for locations and dates.
Héctor Zamora’s work transcends, reinvents, and redefines the conventional exhibition space, generating friction between the common roles of public and private, exterior and interior, organic and geometric, savage and methodical, real and imaginary. With technical expertise and knowledge of lightweight architecture and an emphasis on the process of conceptualization and construction of each piece, Zamora implicates visitors’ participation and requires them to question the everyday uses of materials and the functions of space. Often collaborating with construction laborers, his work provides opportunities for people to use materials differently and to break the rules to open new possibilities of expression and individuality.
Zamora’s Chimera is a performative action in collaboration with street vendors who are ubiquitous in the Coachella Valley but often invisible in the landscape. The artist’s work provides opportunities for people to use materials differently and to break the rules to open new possibilities of expression and individuality, in this case transforming street vendors into walking sculptures made of balloons, which dissipate as visitors buy and take home the balloons and interact with the vendors in a space of dignity.