Matias Viegener

Hostage Situation, 2020
Rope, flour, water, salt, yeast
20 x 1 x 1 feet

Artist Statement
My recent art work has been about intimacy, technology and surveillance.  I’m interested in the overlap of formerly disparate territories, the private versus the public, personal interiority versus the parametrics of evidence and data.  “Hostage Situation” is an installation of bread on a rope dangling down from my living room window, 25 feet above the street.  It interrogates being hostage to an unhinged president, racist police violence, and far-right vigilanteism parallel to as the circumstances of epidemiological quarantine.

Biography
Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who lives in LA and teaches at CalArts.  He is a cofounder of the art collaborative Fallen Fruit (2004-2013) and has exhibited and curated art at LACE, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, ARCO in Madrid, Ars Electronica, and the Badischer Kunstverein. He’s the author of 2500 Random Things About Me and The Assassination of Kathy Acker, and editor of I’m Very Into You, the correspondence of Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, and co-editor of Séance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects.  He has published fiction and criticism in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Fiction International, Framework, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Mirage, Paragraph, Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra.  His work has been written about in The New Yorker, salon.com, The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Art:21, The Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, and The Huffington Post.