Tschabalala Self, Torkwase Dyson, and 9 Other Artists Will Transform the Coachella Valley With Site-Specific Installations for Desert X 2023
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Loading... - Danny Jones
- 07 Feb 2023
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The sprawling art exhibition is slated to run from March 4 to May 7, 2023.
Get your cameras ready. The artist list for the fourth edition of Desert X is here, and it promises to be a stunning show.
The site-specific international art exhibition runs from March 4 through May 7, 2023, and features a cohort of 11 multigenerational artists hailing from Europe, North America, and South Asia, each of whom will produce an artwork responding to the dramatic landscape of the Coachella Valley in Palm Springs, California.
Returning this year is artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Diana Campbell, who together selected the artists to create works that both respond to and take cues from their environment.
“There’s a saying attributed to the Kwakwaka’wakw nation that a place is a story happening many times,” Wakefield said in a statement. “This idea of place as the multiplicity of stories flowing through it is central to Desert X.”
Campbell describes the works as “artistic interventions that make visible how our energy has a transference far beyond what we see just in front of us in our own localities.”
The artists are cast in the role of storytellers, bridging the divide between global issues and individual responsibility and experience. Torkwase Dyson’s Liquid a Place engages the dichotomy of the body as a vessel filled with water, and its physicality within an environment like the desert, where water is a rapidly fading memory. Meanwhile, Tschabalala Self takes on the archetypes of the American West, reconstituting the traditional equestrian statue with a work that highlights the Black and Native women who have long been excluded from this history.
Other projects touch on issues of migration, conspiracy theories rooted in the Western expanse, the proliferation of street vendors, and the notion of invisible labor. Even the image of the mechanical bull and its relationship to masculinity—conceived in projects spanning performance, film, and sculpture—is presented against the dramatic backdrop of the desert. Read More…
