'Tony Oursler: Black Box' opens at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts

30 January 2021

'Tony Oursler: Black Box', on view at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) from 23 January to 16 May 2021, is the first full-scale retrospective of Oursler's career in Asia, a momentous exhibition showcasing his most exemplary video installations, experimental films, and cinema work over nearly four decades.

Oursler has consistently redefined moving image and installation art through innovative and diverse methods, breaking with the two-dimensionalilty of video by incorporating sculpture and performance into his practice, and using projectors to create unique and transformative three-dimensional environments. Black Box reveals his fascination with mystical phenomena and the origins of the camera obscura, conjuring immersive experiences through the use of technologies of projection, video screens and other optical devices.

Among the works on view are GeN – one of Oursler’s new series inspired by facial recognition technology. Focusing on the growth of social media, big data and public and private sector surveillance programs, these "data portraits" underscore Oursler's uneasy relationship with technology, surveillance, and all manners of data tracking. Also on view are the 5D immersive feature film Imponderable (2016), in which a story unfolds from the artist's collection of many newspaper clippings about stage magic, supernatural photography, pseudoscience, and spiritual power. Elsewhere, the grotesque and humorous characters in the Caricatures series derive from explorations into mechanical technology and human emotions.