Josh Kline: Adaptation
The Dreamers, 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennial
June 25, 2021 to August 22, 2021
LAXART
Winter 2022
Production | Acquisition Grant
Adaptation is a short live action science-fiction film set in a near-future New York City. Adjusting to the traumatic shifts caused by global climate change, essential workers move through a city submerged by the waters of rising seas, a world profoundly transformed by the extreme consequences of our political and economic systems. Invigorated with narratives of resiliency and survival, Adaptation is both a film about the future and about the present that leads there. Shot on 16mm film, it will be shown looped on a projector at the center of an installation drawing inspiration from the film’s sets. Storage bins from the film will be used as seating in the gallery. The film is part of Climate Change, the fourth chapter in an epic cycle of installation-based projects begun in 2014 entitled Extinction Story. The cycle is concerned with the unfolding political, economic, technological, and biological changes that will shape human life in the 21st Century. Adaptation is Kline’s most ambitious moving-image work to date and a significant artwork to emerge from and articulate the surreal landscape of 2020.
Adaptation will premiere as a solo exhibition at LAXART, Los Angeles, a non-profit visual art space that promotes developments in contemporary culture through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Adaptation will then travel to the Belgrade Biennial in Serbia, whose 2021 edition, “The Dreamers,” is curated by the editors of CURA Magazine. Founded in 1960, the Belgrade Biennial is the largest international exhibition of contemporary art in Serbia, staged on the basis of a curatorial concept selected by the Salon’s Board.
To learn more, visit LAXART and Belgrade Biennial.
Images: Adaptation (film stills from work in progress), 2019-2020
10min, 16mm film, color, sound
Courtesy the artist; 47 Canal, New York; and Modern Art, London
