Eve Sussman, Simon Lee and Volkmar Klien performance workshop, "Are the Birds Happy"
Eve Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works independently and collectively with her partner Simon Lee and Rufus Corporation, founded in 2003. Along with Rape of the Sabine Women, 2004, and 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2007 that debuted at the Whitney Biennial, the company has collaborated on other projects including Yuri’s Office, 2009, and whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, 2011. Rufus Corporation’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally and are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sussman is a 2010 recipient of the Anonymous was a Woman Award and 2008 Creative Capital grantee.
Simon Lee works in photography, video and installation. His work is said to often be “a powerful metaphor for the random flow of history and a low tech formal tour de force” (Holland Cotter, New York Times). His 2010 film collaboration with Algis Kizys, Where is the Black Beast? (2010) was shown at the Sagamore Collection in Miami, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, IFC Center in New York, and was an official selection at the 2011 Rotterdam Film Festival. Together with Sussman, he co-founded the “Wallabout Oyster Theater,” a micro-theater space run out of their studios in Brooklyn. Lee has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, MA; Roebling Hall, New York; the Moscow International Film Festival; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; Poznan Biennale, Poland; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Tinguely Museum, Basel, Switzerland; Espace Paul Ricard, Paris, France; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Volkmar Klien grew up in Vienna, Austria, spending his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background he strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. As a composer and visual artist he works in various areas of the audible and inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.
His works have been widely recognized: He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien, he composed music to a ballet, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.