Maladaptation to the Screen
2023
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Dehlia Hannah, for ‘In a forest of red, green and blue’, Cécile B. Evans & Troika, Max Goelitz Gallery, Munich, 11 May–17 June 2023

‘Maladaptation to the Screen’
Dehlia Hannah

The 1818 novel Frankenstein, Or: the Modern Prometheus was adapted for the stage almost immediately after its publication. Audiences were fascinated by the tale itself and horrified by the thought that it was authored by a woman only eighteen years of age.  The young Mary Godwin began writing modernity’s paradigmatic tale of scientific hubris and the perils of emerging technology amid a love affair with a married man[…]
Caught Knapping
2022
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Mark Rappolt, ‘Caught Knapping’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Caught Knapping’
Mark Rappolt

A pile of salt.1 Or perhaps two piles of salt. Neither is quite correct. Perhaps it’s easier, for the moment, to leave the material details to one side; to focus on the concept. After all, we’re always being told that that’s what contemporary art is really all about. In any case, everyone knows that today we live in a dematerialised world. How else could we have survived the great[…]
Salting the Earth
2022
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Eva Wilson, ‘Salting the Earth’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Salting the Earth‘
Eva Wilson

Accommodating multiple shades of the colours red, green, and blue as seen by a computer; a salt fountain; chemical gardens; flint chips and silicon wafers; and the last tree on earth,Troika’s project Untertage, developed over several years, takes shape as an elaborate ecosystemic fiction. The focus of the project’s narrative shifts away from a human protagonist and towards a non-human actor who, here, is devised as the real hero of an aeonian drama of world domination. Flipping the traditional figure-ground[…]
Life Matters
2022
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Ariane Koek, ‘Life Matters’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Life Matters’
Ariane Koek

‘What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with.’   – Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”, e- flux Journal, Issue 75 (September[…]
Salt of the World
2022
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Paul Carey-Kent, ‘Salt of the world’, Seisma Magazine, 8 April 2022

‘Salt of the world’
Paul Carey-Kent

The various projects of the London-based Franco-German trio Troika – formed in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel – often focus on how the ‘real’ is giving way to the ‘digital’, and the consequences. Recently, though, they have set new work into a wider, additional, narrative that forms part of their ongoing project ‘Untertage’[…]
Borrowed Light
2018
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Kiki Mazzuchelli, ‘Borrowed Light’, artist book, publ. 2018

‘Borrowed Light’
Kiki Mazzuchelli

‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. […] today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the[…]
Trickle Down Aesthetics
2017
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Greg J. Smith, ‘Trickle Down Aesthetics – Cellular Automata in recent works by Troika’, 28 February 2017

‘Trickle Down Aesthetics’
Greg J. Smith

Cellular automata are one of the classic techniques of deriving algorithmic form, and for good reason – they o!er a great return on investment. Spawning complex and unpredictable 2D patterns from simple rules, they are the type of system that many programmers play[…]
Approaching Perception 
2015
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Claudia Segura ‘Approaching Perception’, ‘Limits of a known Territory’, NC-Arte, 6 Jun - 5 Sep 2015

‘Approaching Perception’
Claudia Segura

‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.’ – William Blake, The Marriage Of Heaven and Hell Perception has been one of the most questioned concepts in the history of art. In its origins, altar painting wanted to simulate religious deeds as truthfully as possible so that people could[…]