Kate Cooper: Sensory Primer – at A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam | art for sale

Kate Cooper:
Sensory Primer – at A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam

Kate_cooper_Sensory_Primer_A_Tale_of_A_Tub_02

Throughout her work Kate Cooper has developed a language within computer-generated technologies to propose positions of autonomy and withdrawal within digital representation. For her exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, she presents a newly commissioned video installation work alongside a new version of her 2017 Symptom Machine.

Cooper’s work grapples with ideas of producing images for consumption; testing where the boundaries of representation might lie through a central digital cipher, encoded as a space through which to explore the performance—and refusal—of labour. Here we are presented with a surrogate with which to navigate the contemporary infrastructures of capital and technology which demand total participation. Cooper’s figures take on different roles: acting as givers of shelter and invisibility, bodies that can perform resistance, be subjected to violence, and yet carry on essentially unscathed, rebuilding themselves to endlessly repeat and perform their labour.

These battered and exhausted digital images present the body ambivalently as both communicator and site of conflict. Cooper approaches the creation and manipulation of these CG bodies with a logic informed by the choreography of the virus within a body’s “sanctuary sites”: vulnerable areas such as the central nervous system where anti-viral drugs cannot easily penetrate. Though inextricably linked to the precise and machine-driven methodologies of digital image production, Cooper consistently reminds us of the fleshy potential of the bodies she creates, challenging viewers’ ability to empathize with an image.

The C.o.C.A. Foundation is a private initiative supporting young artists in the Netherlands with a yearly commission. Earlier recipients include Jay Tan, Rory Pilgrim, Katarina Zdjelar, Christian Friedrich, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Paul Geelen, Lotte Reimann and Emma van der Put. For its ninth edition, Kate Cooper has been selected as the winner of the 2018 C.o.C.A Commission, nominated by curators Julia Mullié and Nick Terra.

Kate_cooper_Sensory_Primer_A_Tale_of_A_Tub_03