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"As in past years, Modern Painters presents a list of emerging artists whose work we \u2014 and the artist-nominators we\u2019ve collaborated with \u2014 find especially promising. In previous lists, we have showcased as few as nine artists and as many as 100. This time we\u2019ve opted for two dozen, which allows us to describe and reproduce work by each while remaining broad and international in our reach. We remain convinced that other artists are the best spotters of talent, and so again this year we\u2019ve relied on the expert aid of a group of seasoned artists: Rita Ackermann, Dike Blair, Sarah Cain, Anne Collier, N. Dash, Thomas Demand, Natalie Frank, Coco Fusco, Samara Golden, Susan Hefuna, Adam Helms, Glenn Kaino, Ali Kazma, Sam Moyer, Lisa Oppenheim, Erik Parker, Tal R, Kirstine Roepstorff, Tino Sehgal, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Fiona Tan, Nari Ward, Jonas Wood, Erwin Wurm. Erik Wysocan.Benjamin HirteBorn 1980, Aschaffenburg, Germany. Lives in Vienna.A sculptor, Hirte thinks in a complex way about presentation and the ideas behind exhibitions, both for his art \u2014 which draws on the history and audience of the spaces in which he shows his work \u2014 and in his curatorial practice. Even though the artworks themselves seem like formalist sculptures and found objects, he sees them as a collage bringing together diverse elements from sculpture and the world of objects.&amp;nbsp;Lisa Oppenheim \u2014 who exhibited a work in a recent show Hirte curated at Drei Gallery, in Cologne \u2014 says, \u201CWhat is remarkable about Hirte\u2019s work is the way in which collage functions as a structuring logic rather than simply a way of describing formal aspects of individual pieces. A central theme in his practice seems to be the way in which ideas are in themselves collages, sourced from different media and historical and physical spaces.\u201D And indeed, the uniting methodology in Hirte\u2019s work draws on ideas that belong to linguistics: wordplay, syntax, and semantics. \u201CBut with an undertone of parody,\u201D the artist adds.Margaret LeeBorn 1980, the Bronx, New York. Lives in Brooklyn.\u201CAll of my work is human-scale, scaled to real life, and appropriative of the banal and everyday,\u201D says Lee of her photographs and sculptures, which often fixate on subjects as unremarkable as the potato. \u201CThey\u2019re handmade readymades \u2014 which, I know, is a contradiction.\u201D Her show last year at Jack Hanley Gallery, in New York, included a watermelon fabricated from plaster and a faux zebra skin made with painted linen. The artist, who runs the New York gallery 47 Canal and is the founder of 179 Canal Gallery, currently has work in \u201CNew Pictures of Common Objects,\u201D curated by Christopher Lew and on view at MoMA PS1 through December 31. \u201CWhile Margaret\u2019s work is rooted in handmade sculpture, it speaks to concerns of life in the 21st century,\u201D explains Lew, \u201Cespecially how the intangible online world is never that far from the physical.\u201DEdgardo AragonBorn 1985, Oaxaca, Mexico. Lives in Oaxaca and Mexico City.\u201CMy work speaks about how power in high places is used to corner a large segment of society,\u201D says Aragon, whose videos deal with conflict in his home country. \u201CI am currently making a video whose origin lies in the social protest against mining on the continent. The result of my investigation is an action executed by a male choir that sings in front of a mine that was abandoned during the colonial period in Oaxaca. The musical composition is made from the street protest slogans, with stylistic hints of Baroque. Another project consists in metaphorically re-creating a \u2018death flight,\u2019 which was something that the government used to disappear tortured bodies of peasants.\u201D The tossing of people from planes into the ocean was a tactic, he tells us, that originated in the South Pacific during the 1970s. \u201CThis despicable practice was subsequently adopted by the South American dictatorships to eliminate their rivals,\u201D Aragon says. \u201CAnd for another recent project, I made a video about the tiny borders that are generated in a small town in southern Mexico, where the residents have violent disputes over how their territory is marked. 13 musicians play separate funeral marches while standing on stone mounds, whose function is to draw the territorial lines.\u201DAjay KurianBorn 1984, Baltimore. Lives in Brooklyn.Lately, Kurian has pursued projects \u201Cconcerned with reaching beyond the human,\u201D as he puts it. One, to be exhibited this fall in India, consists of clarified butter, or ghee, silkscreened directly onto linen. The butter is then dusted with gold, as for fingerprints. The silkscreened images are either taken from the patterns inside security envelopes or are fabrications incorporating quasi-crystalline formations. Both, Kurian says, \u201Care meant to withhold information from others. I found that I was more interested in the mechanism that hid the information than in the information itself. Thus the image becomes a screen, revealing and hiding simultaneously. This work addresses the sense of hiding or withdrawal as a general motif, almost as an aesthetic law: Nothing presents itself as such. Phenomenally, the silkscreened pattern can just barely be seen, and only in a particular light. In the right or wrong position, it disappears into a cloud of golden dust and the scent of musty butter.&amp;nbsp;The series is titled \u2018Prevenient,\u2019 meaning anticipatory; it\u2019s a word borrowed from a phrase, \u2018prevenient grace,\u2019 coined by the 18th-century theologian John Wesley.\u201DKatja MaterBorn 1979, Hoorn, the Netherlands. Lives in Amsterdam.\u201CI record the numerous ways we can look at photography and think about photographic images,\u201D Mater says of her work. Her process is exceptional in that she investigates photography by turning it on itself, disrupting our sense of what this medium is. In her hands, photography loses any relationship to the documentary and instead approaches something closer to painting and drawing, which she takes as the basis of her practice. She interpolates drawing with photograph y\u2014 for example, using a camera to record the process of drawing, which is then masked by multiple negatives, generating countless different outcomes from one supposedly unique drawing. Mater is currently producing a book to be published early next year by Roma.Ian ChengBorn 1984, Los Angeles. Lives in New York.\u201CMy work can\u2019t disguise a love for cinema, special effects, eroticism, stupidity, optical and linguistic distortion, and a desire to promote images to the respect status of objects,\u201D says Cheng, a man of many hats. In addition to making animated videos \u2014&amp;nbsp;This Papaya Tastes Perfect was shown as part of \u201CA Disagreeable Object\u201D at the Sculpture Center, in Queens, this past fall; the same piece had earlier been presented on an iPhone at West Street Gallery, also in New York \u2014 Cheng is director of operations for Badlands, the publishing outlet launched by artist Paul Chan, as well as a director, most recently of a music video featuring carnage rendered in 3-D for the band Liars. Currently he\u2019s working on a 3-D animated film in collaboration with the artist Christian de Vietri. Cheng elaborates: \u201CIt will explore the \u2018sculpting of copyright\u2019 of CGI celebrities through a narrative that documents their transformation from iconic protagonists into a heterogeneous deformed primordial mess. It\u2019ll utilize motion capture both as a technical process to be pushed far beyond its elegant use in Hollywood films and as a radically economical solution to producing a visually unbounded feature-length film.\u201D Other projects include learning to make iPhone apps and coauthoring a romance/self-help novel with the artist (and his girlfriend) Rachel Rose, called Active Social Personal Work Life. Above all, Cheng says he wants \u201Cto live to be 200 years old in order to bear witness to long-term evolutionary and cultural change, and so I\u2019m working on getting better at living.\u201DAngelika LodererBorn 1984, Feldbach, Austria. Lives in Vienna and Feldbach.\u201CStimulated by the idea of what contemporary sculpture is and could be about,\u201D Loderer consistently pushes&amp;nbsp;the medium\u2019s envelope. For Stillleben als Hausfassade (Still Life as House Fa\u00E7ade), 2012, she covered a bucket of fruit in yellow housepaint. Sch\u00FCttl\u00F6che, 2012, is a series of aluminum casts of mole tunnels that, when positioned in a gallery space, resemble dancing alien organisms. Loderer has also made art out of car windshields and slabs of asphalt dangling from plain chairs, and has crafted a pair of semi-wearable shoe sculptures. \u201CI\u2019m interested in the nature of materials and their interactions with each other, in an ephemeral and formal way,\u201D she says.Guillaume AiriaudBorn 1983, Nantes, France. Lives in Berlin.\u201CThere is a certain kind of loneliness to Airiaud\u2019s entire body of work which touches me profoundly,\u201D says artist Kirstine Roepstorff.&amp;nbsp;\u201CI have a copy of his handmade book Thoughts After the Research for the Project \u2018Love Me Tender,\u2019 \u201D she continues. \u201CIt\u2019s very beautiful and poetic. He has a very precise, distinct way of working, using metaphors and storytelling elegantly.\u201DAiriaud\u2019s work process is rooted in his use of materials and includes experimentation with techniques and presentation methods, and it touches upon subjects as abstract as fiction, death, love, and play. \u201CPatient handcrafting brings me to another level of excitement and inspiration,\u201D says the artist, who, apart from making books, works in sculpture, collage, painting, and drawing. He recently collaborated with fashion designer Martin Niklas Wieser on a collection of garments. Airiaud produced some of the pieces in metal. \u201CA major part of it is to create an environment to represent the vision of the project, which we are just starting to develop,\u201D he explains. \u201CIt may involve various disciplines: installation, performance, video, photography, and so forth.\u201D The collection will be out next spring.Meleko MokgosiBorn 1981, Francistown, Botswana. Lives in New York and works in New York, Los Angeles, and Gaborone, Botswana.Mokgosi\u2019s large-scale, project-based installations, such as Pax Afrikaner, 2008\u201311, and Pax Kaffraria, 2010\u201312, take the form of history paintings on panel. They serve, in the artist\u2019s words, as \u201Ca conceptual, theoretical, and personal working-through of a particular dilemma: the physical and epistemological violence toward black foreigners in southern Africa.\u201D&amp;nbsp;Using cinematic tropes as well as psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, his practice interrogates the specificity of regionalism in order to address questions of nationhood, colonial and anticolonial sentiments, and the perception of historicized events. \u201CI am especially interested in how Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and semiotics can be used to comprehend national identification and occurrences such as the 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa,\u201D he says. \u201CPax Kaffraria is a project divided into eight chapters. The installation is constructed to mimic a filmstrip: It strategically uses cinematic scale, privileges peripheral vision as opposed to frontal, and utilizes tropes of cinematic shots\u2014pans and medium-long shots\u2014as well as inter-titles to conceptually frame each chapter. This project investigates nationalism by taking Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies. Pax Kaffraria is a conflation of two terms. The word pax, taken from the original phrase \u2018we Romans have purchased the Pax Romana with our blood,\u2019 highlights the essence of institutionalized, enforced \u2018peace\u2019 at the height of the Roman Empire. Pax Romana, contrary to conventional belief, is not about peace; it is about nationalism, the bond between blood and soil. Kaffraria is a term that was first used by the British in the 18th century to establish British Kaffraria, a subordinate administrative entity that was primarily inhabited by the Xhosa people. More precisely, kaffraria is a British adaptation of the word kaffir, which is used as the equivalent of nigger. Pax Kaffraria, then, is a forcefully made appellation that is chiefly historical.\u201DKyla HansenBorn 1983, Panaca, Nevada. Lives in Claremont, California.\u201CI tend to alter and add to found objects \u2014 rural desert debris, backyard junk, furniture remnants \u2014 Frankensteining them together with glitter, whimsy, and blatant artifice,\u201D Hansen says. Her materials evoke the provincial places she explores in her work. \u201CI still love looking at the way certain things are put together in small, rural towns, the aesthetics of some backwards, makeshift way of getting something done,\u201D Hansen explains. \u201CThe objects I make all seem to have a frivolity about them. They look like they could be broken&amp;nbsp;down, packed away, and wheeled to the next town \u2014 kind of like a traveling circus.\u201D\u201CHansen\u2019s work reminds me of happening upon a desert sunset at the same time you catch yourself laughing at what was just whispered in your ear.\u201D&amp;nbsp; \u2014Sarah CainFiona MackayBorn 1984, Aberdeen, Scotland. Lives in Glasgow and Brussels.Mackay\u2019s&amp;nbsp;vibrant wax and batik dye paintings are inherently contrary, oscillating between controlled design and the fluid spontaneity her medium commands. \u201CMy work has always been concerned with opposites, whether in regard to medium, imagery, or application, in an attempt to confess a personal narrative, versus a public system of signs always in potential flux,\u201D she says. With her batiks Mackay creates further tension by placing a traditional craft within the context of fine art. \u201CThe result is a combination of opposites between male and female,\u201D Mackay explains of the process, \u201Con the one hand connecting to the glory days of abstract&amp;nbsp;painting, a predominantly male territory, while on the other hand situated within the world of textiles and folk art, connected to craft and its usual association to the feminine.\u201DIsabel LewisBorn 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Lives in Berlin.Trained as a dancer, Lewis says that her work \u201Cstrives to find a new mode of performative expression that is not clearly derivative of performance art, nor of theater, nor of dance, while perhaps touching aspects of all these modes of performance.\u201D In her various activities, which run the gamut from dance to curating to visual art,&amp;nbsp;she frequently collaborates with artists, writers, other dancers, and even family members (she makes work with her three siblings under the name Lewis Forever). Her projects experiment with combinations of dance, film screenings, readings, and other such activities. She sees dance \u201Cas a way of conversing with social, aesthetic, and political value systems,\u201D exploring our relationship with objects, spaces, technology, and each other.This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters and will appear on ARTINFO in two parts.&amp;nbsp;[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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