Trisha Baga - Société

TRISHA BAGA 

1985 born in Venice, FL / Works in New York, NY 

2010 MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College 

2007 BFA Cooper Union School of Art 

Solo Exhibitions 

2013 

Société / Berlin 

2012 

Holiday / Dundee Contemporary Arts / Dundee, UK 

The Biggest Circle / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York, NY 

Plymouth Rock 2 / Whitney Museum of American Art / New York, NY 

World Peace / Kunstverein München / Munich 

Rock / Vilma Gold / London 

2011 

Trisha Baga: Performative Screening / EAI / New York, NY 

Screenings and Exhibitions 

2013 

TRISHA BAGA & NO BROW / Galerie Emanuel Layr / Vienna (forthcoming) 

The Magnificient Obsession / MART / Rovereto, Italy 

2012 

Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery / Cologne 

New Pictures of Common Objects / MoMA PS1 / New York, NY 

Inside Out / Kunsthaus Dresden / Dresden 

Troubling Spaces / Zabludowicz Collection / London 

Soundworks / Institute of Contemporary Art / London 

Entrance Entrance / Temple Bar and Gallery / Dublin 

Trisha Baga / Migration Forms Festival / Anthology Film Archives / New York, NY 

Between Commissions / The Cornerhouse / Manchester 

You Told Me the Other Night / Wst street Gallery / New York, NY 

2011 

This is Tomorrow / Annarumma Gallery / Naples 

Open File / Grand Union / Birmingham 

Sandwich pedestrian mysticism sandwich sonata / Johann Koenig Gallery / Berlin 

The Event / Grand Union / Birmingham 

Fernando / Franklin Street Works / Stamford 

Hasta Mañana / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York, NY 

14 & 15 / Curated by David Muenzer / The Lipstick Building / New York, NY 

The Great White Way Goes Black / Vilma Gold / London 

Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com 

SOCIÉTÉ

Rectangle with the Sound of Its Own Making / Curated by Cecilia Dougherty / The Fourth Wall at Vox Populi / 

Philadelphia, PA 

Alias / Bunker Sztuki / Curated by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / Contemporary Art Museum of Krakow / 

Krakow 

2010 

En el Barrio de Gavin Black through evas arche und der Feminist in the back room of Gavin Brown´s Enterprise / 

Curated by Pati Hertling / New York, NY 

In the Company of / Curated by Terri Smith / Housatonic Museum of Art / Bridgeport, CT 

The Pursuer / Greene Naftali Gallery / New York, NY 

Greater New York Cinema Program / PS1 / Long Island City, NY 

Beside Himself / Curated by Terri Smith / Ditch Projects / Springfield, OR 

Hardcorps: Movement Research Festival 2010 / Center for Performance Research / Brooklyn, NY 

Alphabet Soup / The Creative Alliance / Baltimore, MD 

A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O.Incandenza / The Leroy Neiman Gallery at 

Columbia University / New York, NY 

2009 

Adventures Close to Home / Curated by Peggy Ahwesh / Anthology Film Archives / New York, NY 

Los Solos II / Curated by Bonnie Jones / The Load of Fun Theater / Baltimore, MD 

The Fuzzy Set / Curated by Pilar Conde / LAXART / Los Angeles, CA 

Then and Now / LGBT Community Center / New York, NY 

2008 

Our Bodies / Our Selves / Curated by A.L. Steiner / El Centro Cultural Montehermoso / Vitoria-Gasteiz 

Betweeen Us… / Curated by Meghan Dellacrosse / Leo Koenig Gallery / Andes, NY 

Salad Days 3 / Artist’s Space / New York, NY 

Intermission / Art-In-General’s Audio in the Elevator Program / New York, NY 

2007 

Thank God for My Beautiful Black Locks of Golden Black Hair / Cooper Union’s Houghton Gallery / New York, 

NY 

Commisions 

2009 

Love Affair of the Painter Balla and a Chair / Futurist Life: Redux for Performa 09 / Anthology Film Archives and 

SFMoMA 

iShowU09 / Alexander McQueen for Target Launch Event / Curated by Sofia Hernandez 


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Bibliography 

2013 

Christina Irrgang / Paraphantoms / Temporary Gallery, Köln / Frieze d/e, No.8 / February-March, p. 117-118 

Mathieu Malouf on Trisha Baga at Greene Naftali, New York / Attitude Becomes Dorm / Texte Zur Kunst / Issue 

Nr. 89 / March 2013 „Mike Kelley“, p. 199 

2012 

Jenny Jaskey / Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum, New York”, December 5, 2012. Online at: 

http://moussemagazine.it/trisha-baga-whitney 

The New York Times / Vying for Fluency in Many Languages / Art & Design / http://www.nytimes. 

com/2012/12/28/arts/design/trisha-baga-at-the-whitney-greene-naftali-and-moma-ps1.html?_r=0 

Monopol / Trisha Baga - „World Peace“ / Magazin für Kunst und Leben / http://www.monopol-magazin.de/kalender/termin/201011449/kunstverein-muenchen/Trisha-Baga-World-Peace.html 

Herald Scotland / Trisha Baga: Holiday, DCA, Dundee / http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/visual/trishabaga-holiday-dca-dundee.1354935872 

Time Out London / Trisha Baga: Rock / Exhibition Review / http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/259925/tris 

ha-baga-rock 

Artinfo / Trisha Baga: Rock / Exhibition Review / http://in.artinfo.com/galleryguide/797431/797430/event/797433 

2011 

Esperanza Rosales / NICE TO MEET YOU - TRISHA BAGA / Hands-on Mousse Magazin, No. 31, November 

Beau Rutland / Hasta Mañana / Art Forum, Oktober 

Fourth Wall / Review / http://fourthwallatvox.blogspot.de/2011/01/patricia-baga.html 

2007 

Allen Strouse / Viral Video / Artinfo / Review 

Awards and Scholarships 

2011 

Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award / New York, NY 

2008 

Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship / Atlantic Center for the Arts / New Smyrna Beach, FL 

2007 

MFA Fellowship / Bard College / Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 

2007 

Burckhardt Foundation Award / The Cooper Union / New York, NY 

2003 – 2007 

Cooper Union Full Tuition Scholarship / The Cooper Union / New York, NY 


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ATTITUDE BECOMES DORM 

MATHIEU MALOUF ON TRISHA BAGA AT GREENE NAFTALI, NEW YORK 

Trisha Baga, “The Biggest Circle”, Greene Naftali, New York, 2012/13, exhibition view, Photo: Jason Mandella 

Safely nested on the eighth floor of a Chelsea building, Greene Naftali was spared the flooding caused by Hurricane 

Sandy that destroyed a lot of art in the neighborhood this past fall. Still, some of the trauma found its 

way back to the surface upon entering Trisha Baga’s recent exhibition at the gallery. The projected image of a 

palm tree on the back wall and a trail of derelict objects (as well as, occasionally, an abstract painting) sprawled 

across the floor vaguely recalled scenes of destruction on Long Island beaches – with added tropical notes – as 

well as photos of Chelsea gallerists and their assistants putting wet art on the curb to dry. Baga has been known 

to feature prominently in her videos and perform amidst her “glamorized messes”, so the alienating atmosphere 

at Greene Naftali – reinforced by the dim lighting required to view the 3D works – marked somewhat of a departure. 

Still, the lack of human warmth was somewhat compensated for by the visibly hand-wrought quality of 

the decoration, the generally festive color palette, and a diffuse but still palpable sense of slapstick theatricality. 

One finds these qualities in “The Story of Painting” (2012), a 3D slideshow overlaid with quirky digital doodles and 

complemented with audio narration by an amateur art historian on the subject of Impressionist painting – a standin 

for something like serious culture. “Framed” by the shadows of small objects placed on the ground between the 

projector and the wall (a can of soda, a canvas employed as a sculptural prop), the piece both filters a canonical art 

historical reference through a populist lens, and may hint distantly at the work of Baga’s former professor and fellow 

Greene Naftali artist Rachel Harrison. Yet the physical environment of the art-school dorm offers a more potent point 

of origin for this attitude: A space of semi-precarious existence sometimes used to study, sometimes just to throw parties. 

The impression is reinforced by the silent presence in the dark gallery of silhouettes wearing headphones as they 

stare at flickering screens, painted beer bottles on the ground, and a white canvas approximating both the physical 

volume of a pizza box and the colorful palette of a pie with all the toppings. 


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Texte zur Kunst n.89, March 2013 

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Until the provided pairs of electronic 3D glasses and headphones could be made out in the dark and properly activated, 

“Hercules” (2012), a video projected directly on the wall, appeared scrambled and out of focus, its content not 

quite discernible yet not necessarily readable as an abstraction either. With the equipment turned on, the body entered 

a sort of hypnoid trance, and any initial recalcitrance soon gave way to a relaxed state, the eye free to roam across 

the stuff protruding from the luminescent rectangle on the wall. As is the case with many of the videos in the exhibition, 

there is a liberal use of digital compositing effects, transitions, and superimpositions, somewhat facilitating the 

absorption of disparate video clips and sound bites. On the screen, a rapid succession of soundtracks and sequences 

combine appropriated and homemade material – a computer-generated fire, parties, animals, fireworks, a slowed sequence 

of an athlete jumping. The film also offers reflexive moments of respite, notably one in which we see the artist 

at work in her studio, accompanied by a dog. The most effective of these moments may be the sequence in which a 

cow is seen peacefully grazing in the grass in enhanced 3D. Contemplating this high-tech rendition of masticating, 

domesticated livestock, we become aware of our own sensory-deprived body sitting in a gallery in passive enjoyment. 

Commenting on her work in a short interview published in Mousse, [1] Baga consistently opposes traditionally 

feminine attributes of softness and fluidity to masculine clichés of hardness and rigidity. Questioned by Jenny Jaskey 

about the “hyper-Brechtian” quality of the breaks in her video edits, the artist proposes the term “bleeding” as an 

alternative to “breaking”. Later, commenting on her move away from linear narratives, she alludes to “an attempt to 

curve an abstraction of the arc”, concluding that a “straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere”. The 

medusan allegory culminates when, opposing her homemade spin on 3D to Hollywood’s oppressive, industrial use 

of it, Baga refers to the “juices of looking” that she tries to preserve by keeping her work “moist”. For many artists 

of the same generation who engage with cutting-edge audio-visual technologies with simultaneous proficiency and 

playfulness, [2] the act of looking is indeed often associated with juices and liquid environments. [3] 

Its title itself evoking water in a vapor state as well as an impending downpour, “Cloud Atlas” (2012) is full of mercurial 

seductiveness. A single-channel video projection that could elsewhere fit a normal screen is diffracted here by a 

small clay plate encrusted with shards of a mirror – an artisanal variation on the artist’s signature disco ball (found in 

“Madonna y el Nino” as well as “Flatlands”, both 2011, not included in this exhibition). The slowly modulating hues 

and shifts in luminosity produced by the projection’s footage of fireworks approximated the hypnotic flow of a lava 

lamp and a computer screensaver. Ambient and decorative, it still retained something vaguely melancholic. 

And this is perhaps what this exhibition as a whole – more so than its individual parts – achieves most eloquently: 

Sublimating the streams of trash generated by daily existence into a decor impregnated with personal pathos. If a 

similar pathos could be the product of, for example, hours working overtime in front of a computer with frequent 

intervals procrastinating on YouTube, Baga’s work offers a perhaps more genuinely personal and handcrafted entry 

point for the experience. What could have easily turned into a lugubrious accumulation of theatrical failures actually 

becomes a conduit for the transmission of intense feeling. 

NOTES 

1 Jenny Jaskey, “Trisha Baga: Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum, New York”, December 5, 2012. Online at: http://moussemagazine.it/trisha-bagawhitney/. 

2 Simon Denny’s TV aquariums would be but one example; other artists treating the formal motif using other media include Pamela Rosenkranz, Yngve Holen, 

Josh Kline, and Oliver Laric. 

3 At odds with Baga’s protean mode of circulation, “Dickface” is an MS font created by Bill Hayden and Nicolás Guagnini in which letters are composed of 

small erect penises that can only be seen when “hard” (letters do not appear unless caps lock is on). Rather than “flood” its venues, it penetrates them. 


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Texte zur Kunst n.89, March 2013 

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Frieze d/e NO.8, February-March 2013 


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ART REVIEW 

Vying for Fluency in Many Languages 

Trisha Baga at the Whitney, Greene Naftali and MoMA PS1 

The Biggest Circle, at Greene Naftali, has the most expansive view of Trisha Baga‘s work, like „Bag‘s Circle, 2012,“ above, a video installation with an array 

of nondescript objects. 

Trisha Baga must feel as if she had died and gone to heaven. Her poetically frowzy installations of video projections, 

paintings, sculptures and scattered objects can be seen now in two New York museums — in a lobby gallery solo 

show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in “New Pictures of Common Objects,” a group show at MoMA 

PS 1 — and she has a sprawling exhibition at Greene Naftali in Chelsea, a gallery admired by the art world cognoscenti. 

A New York resident, she also had solo shows in London and Munich in 2012. And she is only 27. 

Sometimes a precocious youngster brings to the table intriguing news of her own burgeoning generation. If Ms. Baga 

typifies her 20-something cohort, then a description of what she does from her Web site is noteworthy. It says that she 

“engages the formal languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy and fiction” 

to direct attention to “the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between.” To be an artist of Ms. Baga’s sort 

is not to be good at anything in particular, but to be a porous intelligence open to the world and to all possible ways 

of mirroring it. 

The Greene Naftali show, appropriately titled “The Biggest Circle,” provides the most expansive view of her enterprise. 

For “The Story of Painting,” one of three installations, you don 3-D glasses and headphones, through which 

you hear the popular art historian Sister Wendy lecturing on canonical painters from Titian to Degas with breathless 

wonder. 

On the floor is an array of nondescript objects, including bottles and rough abstract sculptures made of painted foam 

blocks; a generic, brushy abstract painting hangs on the wall. Projected onto the wall over it are changing compositions 

of flat, colorful abstract shapes and a simple mask with eye holes and an oval mouth. Thanks to 3-D technology, 

these elements appear uncannily dimensional. Watching them with Sister Wendy’s fulsome discourse ringing in your 

ears makes for a comical collision of high and low. 

Art & Design, 27/12/2012 

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“Hercules,” a meditation on hero worship, mixes found YouTube videos and recordings made by Ms. Baga. There 

are scenes from a Madonna concert and the London Olympics; penguins on a waterside rock; a teenage boy playing 

with sparklers, which, seen in 3-D, seem to shoot sparks into real space; and home movies of Ms. Baga and friends 

on a boating and picnicking excursion. 

The exhibition’s most emblematic work is “Bag’s Circle,” which centers on a floor-to-ceiling projection of the circular 

mouth of a much-used but empty paper bag that is spinning around and around. The revolving, open sack suggests 

an ethos of inclusiveness that calls to mind artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Pipilotti Rist. 

“Plymouth Rock 2,” Ms. Baga’s installation at the Whitney, is similar to her works at Greene Naftali in the apparent 

randomness of its video projection and distribution of banal objects and sculptures on the floor, some of which cast 

shadows on the wall. 

There is also a certain narrative dimension. Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view, 

and of a man with a metal detector searching for treasure on a beach, suggest a kind of quest, a search for a Holy 

Grail — which turns out to be Plymouth Rock, the boulder on which, legend has it, the Pilgrims first alighted in the 

New World. 

An informative brochure essay by Elisabeth Sherman, a Whitney curatorial assistant who organized the show, quotes 

Ms. Baga’s description of that hallowed stone’s history. It is “the saddest story of an object, where it becomes a symbol, 

and is moved from place to place through overly elaborate processes, broken in half and brought back together, 

chipped away, all of this to accommodate various presentation modes ... Right now, they’ve built a gazebo around it 

to protect it from the rain. A rock protected from the rain. It’s my favorite sculpture story.” 

It is a pathetic Grail, this sad rock, which makes it all the more poignant to contemplate. It is, perhaps, a metaphor 

for our beleaguered spiritual condition. 

In “Hard Rock,” Ms. Baga’s installation of objects and a video projection at PS 1, a 3-D image of a white cube resembling 

a plastic-foam cooler appears intermittently, the object seeming to hover and turn mysteriously in midair. It 

is another sort of Grail, one that contains a secret, an unknown something that may or may not be knowable, perhaps 

the ultimate key to existence. Or maybe it is just an empty container. 

Who knows? What matters to Ms. Baga is the trip, not the final destination. 

Trisha Baga’s “Plymouth Rock 2” continues through Jan. 27 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. “The Biggest 

Circle” runs through Jan. 12 at Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 463-7770, greenenaftaligallery.com. “New Pictures 

of Common Objects” is on view through Jan. 27 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, momaps1. 

org. 


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Art & Design, 27/12/2012 

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Trisha Baga: Holiday, DCA, Dundee 

One of Madonna’s singles inspired the first public show in the UK by New York-based artist 

Trisha Baga, writes Jan Patience 

Saturday 8 December 2012 

I view every day as a school day, especially when it comes to writing this page on new 

exhibitions opening in Scotland. 

The art world is too vast to pretend to know everything, and I'm always looking and learning. 

And so, in the week in which video artist Elizabeth Price won the Turner Prize, I discovered that 

the term "non-diegetic" refers to imagery and sound that does not occur as part of the action. This 

probably accounts for why both bods in the Channel 4 studio discussion prior to Monday night's 

live announcement of the winner said of the video works (and I paraphrase): "You really have to 

be here to get it." 

On first inspection, New York-based Trisha Baga's latest solo show, Holiday, which opens today 

at Dundee Contemporary Arts, fits into this category. Baga is not solely a video artist. There is an 

element of improvisation in the relationship between objects and video in her exhibitions, and this 

clearly matters to her when it comes to installing every artwork. 

I caught up with the artist, who currently has a show running at New York's prestigious Whitney 

Museum of American Art, as she headed out into Dundee in search of accessories in the city's 

pound stores. 

"I usually bring objects from my studio to my exhibitions," the 27-year-old explains, "but 

obviously I couldn't do that for this exhibition. So now I'm about to go shopping in Dundee. 

"I've already had a look around and it has occurred to me that pound stores and what we call dime 

stores are different. The rubbish here is different. It's made me think of the specificity of objects." 

With this in mind, she begins to create a "chaotic" landscape formed of "luminous paint and 3D 

projectors, each projector showing a combination of personal and found footage". Objects from 

discount retailers, charity shops and Tayside Recyclers, including paintings, fake flowers and 

household goods, have now been stacked, painted over or projected on to create a series of 

immersive installations that fill the space. 

Baga's trademark is weaving intricate narratives from snatches of everyday life and popular 

culture, often tracing religious and historic references. When I mention a hypnotic passage in her 

work Plymouth Rock (2012), in which we see seawater lapping against a camera that dips above 

and below the surface, she tells me she just took her camera for a sunset walk while in her native 

Venice in Florida and ended up with this squelchy footage. Little wavy digital squiggles have 

been added at the edit. 

Herald Scotland, 08/12/2012 

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Holiday, inspired by the artist's abiding fascination for Madonna, is her first solo exhibition in a 

public gallery in the UK, following successful show at Vilma Gold Gallery in London and 

Kunstverein München Plymouth Rock is the centrepiece of this exhibition - the installation 

considers the famous pilgrim landing site in Massachusetts through Chinese takeaway menus and 

a recital of a Justin Bieber Christmas song. The mixter-maxter soundtrack includes Gloria 

Estefan's Rhythm Is Gonna Get You, music from the film American Beauty, and occasional low, 

muttering voices interspersed with the splooshing and swooshing of water and the sound of 

mobile phone ringtones. 

Baga was born in 1985, two years after Madonna had her hit single Holiday and, when we discuss 

this, she talks about how her interest in Madonna has moved on to an abstract level. "Recently I 

heard something from her new album," she explains, "then I realised it was coming from a 

cellphone. I'm interested in the act of looking in between the thing you are looking at or listening 

to." 

Baga has become known for idiosyncratic storytelling that celebrates and resists contemporary 

culture's love affair with broadcast technology. She throws in snatches of digital trickery, but 

there is still a 1950s, slightly skewed, cookie feel to some of the work, especially when she 

wanders around tourists on a trip to the Statue of Liberty, for example, wearing a pair of bizarre 

boggly comedy glasses. 

Baga's work worms its way into the spaces between what Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called "the 

shadow and the soul". In the ether, it grows on you. In the flesh, I could get to like it... 

Trisha Baga: Holiday is at DCA, Dundee (01382 909900, www.dca.org.uk) until January 27. 


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Herald Scotland, 08/12/2012 

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Trisha Baga “Plymouth Rock 2” at the Whitney Museum, New York 

Trisha Baga interviewed by Jenny Jaskey on the occasion of “Plymouth Rock 2”, Baga’s first US solo show. 

Jenny Jaskey: Your work currently on view at the Whitney Museum, Plymouth Rock 2, presents a fractured narrative. 

It seems to suggest, to borrow Adorno’s aphorism, that “the whole is untrue”. I’m wondering if you could speak 

a bit more about your interest in the fragment and in returning to an icon of past without looking for an origin. 

Trisha Baga: Now that you’ve got me thinking about the word origin (even though I’ve been listening to 

that song “Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch over and over again for the past four months), I 

think the origin you are referring to, I think to me, that is the present – the here, now experience. Which is such 

a dumb and impossibly slippery thing, but we are all subject to grasping at it, each from our singular bodies. 

What we experience is only a fragment of what we are aware of and vice-versa, and what I am interested in is 

the stuff that fills the gaps. Desire is a part of it, and I am realizing that the 3D video piece I just showed you 

(the long one with fireworks and karaoke starships) is about, well, this is what I wrote in my notebook earlier 

today: the desire to exceed the body, and how that led to sports, the industrial revolution, 3DTV, and Madonna. 

JJ: Speaking of Madonna, there are a number of subjects that recur in your videos. She is one, but I’m also 

thinking of “natural” phenomena like water, fire, and light. I use scare quotes around “natural” here, because 

I’m not sure that the nature/culture divide holds up in this case. What is the appeal of these elements for you? 

TB: Biologically, these are the elements of culture (like a bacteria culture/growth/life) – the elements of culture and perception. 

All living things contain water, and light is the only thing we can see. You could say that fire is the body version 

of light. These are actually super-traditional references. “The sea” and “the sun” are the large bodies of these elements 

and they can constantly be located as the object of metaphors, from contemporary pop songs to ancient storytelling. I 

think of them as moody constants that inform and are informed by the things they surround and contain, as well as things 

that contain them. The words we use to describe the weather are often the same words we use to describe emotions. 

JJ: I once heard you say in passing that you were more interested in reality than fiction, 

and I’m wondering how this might square with your obsession with larger-than-life figures 

like Madonna or the Olympics, typically regarded in terms of how they occupy mediatized space. 

TB: I’ve been thinking of the show at Greene Naftali, “The Biggest Circle”, as an early stage of understanding 

“epic”, but in broad layers instead of progressive steps.* The Olympics is a large subject (the history of the 

world’s culture) that has been condensed by representation. In contrast, Madonna or Plymouth Rock are both 

body-sized subjects that have been expanded by representation. There is something about using my own body and 

blunt experience as a form of mediation or filter that enables sympathy for these bodies. You could say it makes 

them body-sized again. Stem cell research. * I have issues with progress – the concept of it, the stretch towards 

it, the motivations behind it, and its psychological implications, especially in regard to America and American 

history and ideals. It seems like an insatiable hunger, or an excuse to take things away from other people. 

I think it is also related to how I’ve been stepping away from narrative video, or at least making an attempt to curve 

an abstraction of the arc, back into a circle. A straight line is often the least efficient way to get anywhere. 


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Mousse Magazine, 5/12/2012 

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JJ: A number of writers have remarked on how your work is sort of hyper-Brechtian – layer upon layer of 

“breaks”, so to speak: the direct address of the film, the interruption of physical objects on top of filmed objects, 

the play of “real” shadows against projected ones. While Brecht was interested in laying bare the mechanisms 

of theater, I’m wondering if you think that is even possible – is there any sort of outside to which we can return? 

TB: We’re over the whole fourth wall thing, right? How many times can people look at us and go “voilà!” 

and have that be exciting? I hope my work bleeds rather than breaks. I know that my practice does – between 

art and life and making and gathering. Maybe that answers your question about the outside. But ultimately 

I think it depends on who is looking at the work and what condition their eyes are in at the moment. 

JJ: Your work for “The Biggest Circle” at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York has a strong relationship 

to painting, and I’m wondering if you could say a bit more about this aspect of the work. 

TB: I don’t know how to talk about painting, but when I started working with 3D video, it felt like I 

was painting. I was making curiosity-driven decisions about light and color and composition, and it was 

very liberating. It was about understanding what “stripeness” is and how that is different from “redness” 

and “underness” and letting those THINGS set off strings of associations without demanding 

that these qualities align into modes of linearity (which would bring them outside of their own terms). 

JJ: In other words, an interest in uncovering the hidden ecologies of the everyday materials around us. For example, 

asking not just what a sequined shirt signifies, but wondering about its capacities for diffusing light. 

TB: The object is not to re-historicize, but to adjust the dials on attention, perception, and affect in order to arrive at a 

THING’s natural frequency. For example, looking at an image of a tennis ball but knowing the THING you are looking at 

is hairiness and comedy. Wanting to pull qualities an arm’s distance away from their names, or “the people’s understanding”. 

JJ: It strikes me that this way of looking happens much more slowly – that it requires a different pace. 

TB: I want to create a greater space of looking. The best thing about consumer-grade 3D technology is that the viewers 

have their own choices to make about what they look at within the frame, allowing the images to move and change 

much more slowly. It stands in contrast to Hollywood’s typical way of directing focus and eye movement, which I 

find so oppressive and wasteful. To borrow an analogy from cooking, I want to spend more time in the oven without 

drying out the juices of looking. 

Exactly. The work stays moist. 


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Mousse Magazine, 5/12/2012 

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Time Out London, 24/06/2012

28.04.2012 - 17.06.2012 

Trisha Baga – „World Peace“ 

„Eine logische Konsequenz aus der gegenwärtigen Verbreitung der Massenmedien besteht darin, dass der eigentliche 

Wert kultureller Erfahrung einfach durch die flüchtige Befriedigung ersetzt wird, die Besitztum mit sich bringt. Insofern 

konnte ein universelles Konzept wie „World Peace“ („Weltfriede“) kürzlich als Kulisse für den Popstar Madonna 

fungieren – in Form einer gigantischen medialen Landschaft aus Monitoren, die um ihre Bühne herum angeordnet 

waren. Eine solche Hightech-Veranstaltung ist weit weg von den instabilen Landschaften aus einzelnen Projektoren, 

Wasserflaschen und reflektierenden Materialien, wie sie sich bei der in New York lebenden Video- und Performancekünstlerin 

Trisha Baga (geb. 1985 in Venice, Florida, USA) finden. Und doch hat Baga genau diese Formulierung, 

„World Peace“, als Titel ihrer ersten institutionellen Einzelausstellung im Kunstverein München gewählt. Dahinter 

verbirgt sich die Einsicht, dass für einen Imagewechsel und die Neudefinition einer bekannten Trope ein Beamer und 

eine Wasserflasche völlig ausreichend sind. Die Ausstellung „World Peace“ präsentiert fünf Videoinstallationen von 

Trisha Baga, die die Ausstellungsräume durch die Verwendung ungewöhnlicher Materialien in atmosphärische Landschaften 

aus Lichtreflexionen und Sound verwandeln. In ihrer Gesamtheit kennzeichnen sie die zwanglosen und in 

hohem Maße improvisierenden Vorgehensweisen, mit denen die Künstlerin die Muster hinter der heutigen Bildproduktion 

untersucht, die sich aus fast drei Jahrzehnten Videoclips, Dokumentationen, Konzerten und Interviews speist. 

Trisha Baga steht für eine junge Künstlergeneration, die den konsumorientierten Aspekt heutiger Bildproduktion 

als gegeben hinnimmt und einfach die unendliche Zahl an Bildquellen, die das Internet und andere populäre 

Medien bereitstellen, anzapft. Dennoch besteht die Zielsetzung der Künstlerin nicht darin, die zunehmende 

Standardisierung der Bildproduktion in den heutigen Medien offenzulegen. Ihr geht es vielmehr um das Thema 

Komplexität. Anschaulich wird dies, indem sie durch die Veränderung des Präsentationskontextes immer wieder 

neue Darstellungsebenen und Blickwinkel bei der Entwicklung einzelner Videoarbeiten hinzufügt. Ein bestimmtes 

Video kann dann als Lecture-Performance oder als Hintergrund für eine Karaoke-Performance fungieren oder 

aber dazu eingesetzt werden, beliebige Objekte in einer Rauminstallation zu beleuchten. Diese formalen Adaptionen 

werden von der Künstlerin dokumentiert und fließen ihrerseits wieder in das entsprechende Video ein. 

Im Kunstverein München besetzt Baga den Raum, indem sie ihre Videoinstallation durch die Hinzufügung der 

visuellen Metaphern Licht, Reflexion und Wasser in eine illuminierte Landschaft verwandelt. So zeigt ein Video 

mit geradezu dokumentarischer Präzision, wie Regen gegen ein Fenster prasselt (Rain, Video, 2012). In 

der Videoinstallation Body of Evidence, ebenfalls von 2012, nimmt eine Wasserflasche das Zentrum der Bühne 

ein. Zwischen Projektor und projiziertem Bild platziert, verdeckt sie die Mitte der Projektion. Der Vordergrund 

verwandelt sich dadurch in den Hintergrund und umgekehrt, sodass das mediale Bild destabilisiert wird. 

Trisha Baga lebt und arbeitet in New York. Bisherige Ausstellungen ihrer Arbeiten fanden unter anderem 

statt im PS1, Artist’s Space, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Anthology Film Archives, Greene 

Naftali und Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. Am 30. März 2012 präsentierte sie im Cornerhouse 

Manchester eine neue Performance mit dem Titel Pedestrian Mysticism (www.cornerhouse.org).“ 


SOCIÉTÉ 

Monopol, 2012

Blouin Artinfo, 05/04/2012 


SOCIÉTÉ

Interview by: Esperanza Rosales With: Trisha Baga Page: 1/3 

Hands-on 

Trisha Baga 

interviewed by Esperanza Rosales 

A work in transition. It all thrives on precariousness, 

on the brink of collapse. But obviously 

also on that of improvisation and possibility. 

Top – Found Cheetah, 2010. Courtesy: the artist 

Middle, left – Flatlands, 2010. Courtesy: the artist 

Bottom – Peacock, 2011. Courtesy: the artist 

Un lavoro in transizione. Che vive nella precarietà 

e sull’orlo del fallimento. Ma ovviamente 

anche su quello dell’improvvisazione e della 

possibilità. 

110 

Hands-on, 05/04/2012 

1/2 


SOCIÉTÉ

Interview by: Esperanza Rosales With: Trisha Baga Page: 2/3 

Esperanza Rosales Your • lms are very intricately 

layered. How do you begin working with 

material from so many sources? 

Trisha Baga I always begin with a few elements 

I’ve been thinking about for a while. I 

have a collection of interests that I nourish, 

and whenever they get kind of full, I see what 

goes together and how they go together. With 

Peacock (2011), I had The Joy Luck Club, my 

Dad’s old super 8 fi lms and footage from a residency 

I did in Florida, where we took some 

machetes with which we cut a path through 

the woods. I wanted to remake The Joy Luck 

Club, but more about the objects than the 

people. This makes me think about the New 

World, and concepts tied to freedom. Once I 

had those things, it became a matter of fi nding 

the musical qualities of the relationships. 

My structure and timing come from really 

common movies, like the ones they show on 

TBS. Lately I’ve been interested in the way 

commercials operate on Hulu, and how if you 

watch a show on Hulu it’s hard to tell what 

you’re watching – the ad or the copy of the 

ad. It’s a question of layers of representation. 

ER You tend to work with what’s around you, 

and in terms of the props you make, not everything 

seems built to last. 

TB Yeah, generally it is made with what is 

within arm’s reach. I try to keep a lot of glue, 

foam and things that sound good, or that I 

relate to in a tactile way, within easy reach. 

Most of what I produce ends up in my work 

somehow. I really like making objects, but I’m 

terrible at it. They fall apart after fi ve days, or 

I forget where I put them and sit on them, or 

I put my projector down on them or something. 

So it’s not really practical to make them 

unless I have a good excuse. But I’m not that 

interested in product. I think that everything 

should be an experiment and lead to something 

else. Formally, I’m most interested in 

making transitions. 

ER Where else does frailty and impermanence 

enter into your constructive vocabulary and 

working process? 

TB In my work hands and thumbs get in 

the way, things get dirty and I throw stuff on 

the fl oor, because I like distractions, the way 

they divert attention to diff erent parts of the 

screen. I try to make the failure of everything 

transparent, because I think there is a rhythm 

about the way things fail. I’m getting more 

familiar with the way I always forget to bring 

one thing or another to the performance, so I 

have to improvise. I’m working with that, in a 

way, through editing. Because something that 

occurs rhythmically can gain thematic meaning, 

just by the way it’s structured in time. 

ER When did you start making props and sets? 

TB I made a sitcom where I played all the 

parts, and I had to solve a lot of object problems 

there. I made episodes for two years and 

used them as a way to teach myself how to 

make video, edit, and make objects that had 

some kind of fi xed structure, to avoid the fear 

of the blank canvas. I could make a painting in 

one day and put it in the background. It was 

a way to get my hands on things, maybe eve- 

rything I do is just a way of getting my hands 

on things. 

ER In Madonna y El Niño, 2009, you compare 

the evolution of Madonna’s musical career 

and her stylistic choices to the water cycle and the 

extended use of a metaphor she was so fond of: 

light. How did that project develop? 

TB I worked at a video store for a while, 

and every night at closing time we would 

play “The Immaculate Collection”. Looking 

at what Madonna did, I was really overwhelmed 

by this idea that she was trying 

to have sex with the whole world at once, 

through a camera. I realized that if eyes were 

hands, that if looking at something was touching 

something, then that’s the kind of sex she 

was trying to have. In so many of her songs 

she talks about how we can’t really see her, or 

how we can see her, but we can’t touch her, 

or how we can touch her, but there would be 

no warmth. It was basically her interaction 

with modes of technology as they evolved 

throughout her career. Like, True Blue is a 

tribute to the blue screen. Then there’s the 

Take a Bow video where she very literally has 

sex with the TV and puts her hands all over 

it. Madonna y El Niño was a weird piece for 

me. Normally I just improvise with materials 

and see where they go and what forms they 

make of themselves, but with that piece it felt 

like I had to say something. 

ER How did this compare to the starting point 

for The Love Story of the Painter Balla and a 

Chair, 2009, the video you made for Performa? 

TB They were remaking Vita Futurista, a 

lost Futurist fi lm, and had the director’s notes 

for several chapters. They took eleven artists 

and randomly assigned each of us one section 

from the notes. The section I got was 

“Balla falls in love with a chair and marries 

it.” I tried to express a waiting, avoiding any 

specifi city, just trying to use colors and light 

through the screen. 

ER Tell me about your performance last weekend, 

The Garden Party 1 . You said it was an 

object play? 

TB During my fi rst site visit to Stamford 

I noticed that every Christmas they have 

someone dressed as Santa Claus rappel down 

the side of their tallest building. At some 

point during the summer, I asked if I could 

rappel a sandwich down the side of the building 

as a part of a performance. I got permission, 

but then a week before the event they 

denied it to me. 

ER When you say rappel, do you mean glide 

down the side of the building, or...? 

TB Basically I was going to dress as a cow 

and lead people from the gallery where the 

group exhibition was taking place and then 

after the procession we would watch the 

sandwich go down the side of the building 

at the same rate as the sunset; it would have 

been kind of poetic. But then everything got 

really messed up, it needed corporate approval. 

I got really upset and staged a protest, 

and then waited for the sandwich to 

come and it never did. 

111 

ER So the actual performance came together 

as a procession with signs instead? 

TB It was born out of the remnants of the 

thwarted plan. I spent the performance inside 

a two-person cow costume. I was the front half 

of the cow and my friend and collaborator, 

Nick Parker, was the back. We built the outfi t 

ourselves, out of all the black and white clothing 

we could fi nd at a thrift store, and when we 

were in it we were mostly blind and wearing 

high heels, just trying to put one foot in front 

of the other without falling apart. After the 

procession to the building we showed a text 

piece I’d written in washable marker on a pad 

of newsprint, and we tore the pages off one 

by one, tossing them into the corporate park 

fountain. Then we played the Moonlight Sonata 

on the piano. 

ER What did the signs say? 

TB It wasn’t really a protest, but more like 

a declaration of being there, of having a body 

and being a little bit loud about it. So they said 

things like “We are Here”, “Changes”, “Singles, 

Couples, Friends and Family”. Another 

was a pizza box taped to a stick that said “God 

Bless America”. 

ER Do you already know what you’ll work on 

next? 

TB I’ve wanted to make the story of Plymouth 

Rock 2 into a fi lm since I was fourteen, 

because it’s just the saddest story of an object, 

where it becomes a symbol, and then is moved 

from place to place through overly elaborate 

processes, broken in half and brought back 

together, chipped away, all of this to accommodate 

various presentation modes – portico, 

pedestal... Right now, they’ve built a gazebo 

around it to protect it from the rain. A rock 

protected from the rain. It’s my favorite 

sculpture story. 

NOTES 

1. Part of the group show “Fernando” at Franklin Street 

Works in Stamford, Connecticut. 

2. The traditional site of disembarkation by the Mayfl ower 

Pilgrims, the fi rst European settlers in North America, 

who founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620. 


SOCIÉTÉ 

Hands-on, 05/04/2012 

2/2


SOCIÉTÉ 

Artforum International, 10/2012

Fourthwall, 01/2011 


SOCIÉTÉ


SOCIÉTÉ 

Blouinartinfo 06/02/2012

Trisha Baga - Société

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