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Vessel by Damien Jalet

Vessel (2015) is a strange and lovely creation by choreographer Damien Jalet in collaboration with multidisciplinary sculptor Kohei Nawa.

Human bodies take totemic, writhing, fluid, and torturous forms, combining and resisting assimilation, constantly morphing and shifting. Slightly uncanny, it feels like a ritual that is being enacted, and has the clarity of a hallucinatory vision. Seeming to take place in a black void of night, on a body of water dimly moonlit and only made visible by its dark ripples, it has the terrible perfection of a transposed dream.

“At the intersection between sculpture and choreography, the two art forms meet and become indivisible. Taking the contradictions of the human body as their starting point, the artists, together with a group of seven dancers, create a fascinating work embracing regeneration and deterioration, solid and liquid, anatomy and mythology.”

Jalet also choreographed the iconic dance sequences in 2018’s Suspiria. The unnerving, complex, unique and vital qualities of his art feel alienating, but necessary – inevitable the moment that they are revealed. They are beautiful in the sense of something that is not known, not imagined, not thought of, until he calls it forth, at which point it answers an unspoken call in us.

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Olivier de Sagazan

Olivier de Sagazan’s truly disturbing, visceral, liminal performance art pieces tread the fluid boundaries between beauty, grotesqueness, terror, uncanniness, and creativity. The emotional intensity and sheer bizarreness of his uncanny art, which is a hybrid of painting, photography, sculpture, and performance, takes the viewer beyond ordinary considerations of aesthetic pleasingness into a world of violently expressed and unnervingly arcane impulses.

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Dennis Cooper + Gisèle Vienne

These eerie yet alluring adolescent life-size dolls were created for the theater pieces which Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne have collaborated on since 2004. As Cooper says, “We consider the dolls to be actors in our works almost on a par with the human performers, and, although the dolls aren’t credited individually in the works, they each have names and fictional biographies constructed by Gisele. These biographies are used to determine which roles might be suited to their ‘personalities.'”

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“The Exorcism of…” by Anti Sweden

I love the movement in this film, the dark, wild kinetic energy. Directed by Marius Tharaldsen and modeled by Vilde Victoria Madsen, for design agency Anti’s newly launched black denim line, “Anti Sweden.” Inspired by the Norwegian “culture of darkness” and the spirit of black metal’s aesthetics.