Common Love,
Aesthetics of Becoming
April 27–June 11, 2011
Mika Tajima
Dead by Third Act, 2008
Single-channel video, color, sound
14 min. 40 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee Gallery
Dead by Third Act is a single-channel video projection and sound piece. Its materials stem from a 2008 performance by Mika Tajima / New Humans that took place in the former Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. A historic and problematic site of industry, workers' unrest, Italian Modernism and Futurism, the factory (now a mixed commercial space) serves as both a site of destruction—the group symbolically smash a Fiat automobile—in addition to a site for the harnessing of creative alternatives. The fourteen-minute video contextualizes the performance within the factory's abandoned architecture and the preparations for an international art fair, Artissima, which co-produced the project. In the context of this exhibition, Dead by Third Act exists through the filmic and immaterial components of its original state.