ICA Associates: PAN present Aleksandra Domanović & M.E.S.H., Ville Haimala & Jenna Sutela, Harm van den Dorpel and HELM x Embassy for the Displaced

Artist Bios

• Aleksandra Domanović

  Aleksandra Domanović’s work is concerned with the circulation and reception of images and information, particularly as they shift meaning and change register, traversing different contexts and historical circumstances. Her works create strange taxonomies and manic associative chains that poke and prod at copyright laws, unpack the geopolitical implications of web domains, or explore, for instance, the model of exhibitions.

• M.E.S.H.

  As a co-resident of Berlin club night Janus, M.E.S.H. is constantly at work bringing fragmented rhythms to the dancefloor and recontextualising club dynamics. His debut full-length released on PAN, Piteous Gate, was a bold step forward as an unpredictable, sometimes frightening album of oblique, theatrical sound-stages. Violent cinematic effects enshroud ornate, virtual-acoustic instrumentation, with an eerie calm ebbing beneath the flux – a sense of shocked ambivalence.

• Ville Haimala

  Finnish music producer and artist Ville Haimala currently lives and works in Berlin. With his background in architecture and electronic club music, he is now focusing on more experimental studio work. This work, produced under different monikers and often blurring the boundaries between music and contemporary art, has been presented and performed at various internationally acclaimed institutions including MoMA PS1 and Volksbühne in Berlin and events such as Unsound Festival, Ultima Festival and CTM Festival.

• Jenna Sutela

  Berlin-based Finnish artist Jenna Sutela's installations, text and sound performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments – most recently, the relationship between the body and its technologically-mediated environment. Her work has been presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and South London Gallery and her writing has been published by Fiktion, Harvard Design Magazine and Sternberg Press among others.

• Harm van den Dorpel

  Harm van den Dorpel is a Berlin-based conceptual artist. His work has been exhibited internationally in Germany, the US, Italy, the UK and Holland. His broad practice includes the creation of sculpture, collage, computer animation, computer generated graphics and interaction design. He is regarded as a key figure in Post-Internet art. In his work he investigates how algorithms can analyse digital archives and guide the artist in aesthetic decision taking, leading to a symbiosis of man-machine art creation. Using computer programming he describes traditional notions in art, such as for example the free use of intuition and expression. Conclusions from this research are then fed back into the production of new work. His ultimate goal is to reveal the reasoning structure of his own consciousness, and his implicit associations and assumptions. In this process he borrows ideas from psychoanalysis, the writing of Jacques Derrida, and Artificial Intelligence (which he studied). His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museum such as MoMa PS1, The New Museum NYC and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw.

• Embassy for the Displaced

  Established between London, Athens, and the island of Lesvos, Greece in December 2015, the Embassy for the Displaced is a faux-institution. Operating as an espace autre, a lateral space within and against the power assemblages of Citadel Europe, the 'Embassy' does not seek to occupy or represent a particular territory or soil. It seeks to transgress any geographical constraints, attempting a non-linear, radical archaeology of the landscapes and events in which it operates, through practices of spatial investigation, media-driven research, and political activism. Presented here is a series of 3D scanned moments of the refugee crisis as it unfolded on Lesvos over the past year. The scanning process was conducted in collaboration with ScanLab Projects, London.

• HELM

  HELM is a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, active since 2006 and working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. He has produced four full-length albums and three EPs consisting of dense compositions which explore the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds. HELM's initial influences covered a broad range of 20th and 21st century avant-garde and experimental music, yet recently the project has grown to incorporate elements and ideas from other forms of electronic music, particularly industrial and different strains of dance music, something which more accurately reflects his own listening habits. He has also performed extensively across international territories in various different locations and environments, including many festival dates and tours with Danish band Iceage. His music has also been included in the East End Film Festival as part of Blanck Mass' re-score for the 2013 film The Strange Colour Of Your Bodies Tears and also installation work for Tate Modern, ICA and-NYC based artist Charles Atlas.