Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken is an American artist and filmmaker. Defying conventional genre boundaries to reimagine what a work of art can be – and what an art experience can achieve – he visually articulates a world driven by information and continuous flux. At their core, his works invite us to consider the nature of the present and signal possibilities for the future. His body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations.

His immersive aesthetic, characterised by a fascination with motion and velocity, reflects the nature and structure of our media-saturated cultural condition. Aitken assembles models of contemporary experience to create a new landscape in which he hopes viewers will find points of anchor and experience a sense of connection. For each project, he selects the medium or combination of mediums that best amplifies and visually articulates the qualities of his subject. His works range in scale from a single photograph to complex moving sculptures composed of infinitely reflective automated mirrors, as well as quasi-narrative films that form intricate mazes of open-ended stories told across reinterpreted architectural spaces.

His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna Secession, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He participated in the Whitney Biennial 1997 and 2000 and earned the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 for the installation “electric earth”. Aitken received the 2012 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, and the 2013 Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award: Visual Arts.