Visiting Artist Lecture: Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeological studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s work applies the lens of material culture to consider how authority is negotiated within political, social, and economic systems.

Gale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Gale’s broad-ranging installations blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. Through approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated. By engaging with materials that are simultaneously acoustic and protective like foam and terrycloth, Gale’s recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions.

Gale’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale's first European institutional solo exhibition will take place at London's Chisenhale Gallery in 2022. In 2020 Nikita was part of the group exhibition In, Of, From: Experiments in Sound curated by Cecilia López, Jules Gimbrone and Jesús Fuenmayor, University Galleries, University of Florida, Gainesville.

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