Artists' Fellowship - 2000
Video
Artist Statement:
In Diamond Sea and Electric Earth, Doug Aitken strives "to bring the viewer toward something tangible and to provide him or her with a sense of discovery and questioning." Diamond Sea was filmed over a five-week period in the Namib Desert of Southern Africa. This area of land, which covers 70,000 square kilometers, has been shut off from civilians since 1907 and is the world’s richest gem diamond mine in the world. Aitken sets the "the immeasurable emptiness" of the region against the "highly evolved computerized machines."
More about the Artist:
In 2007 Doug Aitken was commissioned by MoMA and the arts organization Creative Time to create a large scale public video project that was projected onto six facades in Manhattan. Aitken was the first to bring art to the exterior walls of the MoMA. Called Sleepwalkers, the video featured Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho.
Aitken pushes the boundaries of sculpture, video, and narrative. "I became restless with the flat surface of the screen so the work gradually evolved into the rest of the space," says Aitken in his book Alpha.
Aitken has built installations in Paris, London, Barcelona, Tokyo, Prague, and Vienna, many of which feature projections on multiple screens with different images running simultaneously. He often explores themes of abandonment, social isolation, and technological detachment: in Electric Earth, an eight-screen video for which he was awarded the International Prize at the Venice Beinnale in 1999, a man wanders the streets of Los Angeles at night, alone and detached from society. In Diamond Sea, 1999, Aitken traveled to Africa to document the empty expanses of abandoned desert diamond mines.
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