The collective DIS is exemplary in defining what Hannah Black in Artforum describes as the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life, express(ing) the despairing atomization, and the compromised longing for solidarity, of a post-bourgeois creative class hovering on the brink of its own obsolescence”.

Formed in 2010, after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and global recession, DIS as an entity has over the decade typified its aesthetic, cultural, political and economic impact. Composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Their work exists often simultaneously online and in situ, as well as more traditional mediums like photography, sculpture, video and installation. Their current multi year project dis.art is a subscriber-based online video channel popularising in “edutainment”, helping us understand the complicated social machinery of our techno-capitalist world. The channel presents new commissions with other artists as well as DIS’ own content.

In 2021, DIS co-curated the Biennial for Image Movement Geneva, featuring their latest work Everything but the World. In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything But The World presents a non-linear, natural history show about homo sapiens, linking the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers. It addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Recent solo exhibitions include, How To Become A Fossil at Secession, Vienna, Everything But The World at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Big Beat Disaster at Project Native Informant, London. 

As opaque in their referents as they are blatant, GCC exploits the rhetoric around false utopias of transnational bureaucratic bodies, exploring the constructions of such identities through clever articulations of their own. When they appropriate the gestures and self-mythologizing imagery involved in diplomatic proceedings, they seek to uncover them as rituals with no real meaning. GCC stands for many things, but primarily an acronym synonymous with a political and economic union, the Gulf Cooperation Council.

For their debut exhibition at Project Native Informant, GCC presented photographic outtakes from their first annual summit in Morschach, Switzerland. A sinfully beautiful confluence of lakes and mountains is the backdrop for the handshakes, iPad deliberations and tea services that serve as glimpses of the collective’s diplomacy at work. This performance for camera lampoons the convening of the Council, held in a similarly luxurious setting and with similar jockeying between leisure and statesmanship. 

Previous solo exhibitions include their first year survey of work at MoMA P.S.1, 2014, which traveled to the Sarjah Art Foundation and participation in group exhibitions as the Future Generation Art Prize and the New Museum, 2014, the UCCA Beijing and Whitney Museum of Art, 2015, and Berlin Biennial curated by DIS in 2016. In 2018, GCC were commissioned by Art Dubai to produce the fair’s extensive programming outside of the gallery halls as a large-scale immersive installation. Titled GOOD MORNING GCC (.صباح الخیر جي. سي. سي), GCC created a working television set, using the tropes of daytime talk shows commonly featured on TV stations across the Arab world as an anchor for the programming. 

Founded in 2013, current members include Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Amal Khalaf, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Fatima Al Qadiri, Khalid al Gharaballi and Nanu Al-Hamad.

The basic objectives of the GCC are to effect collaboration, transformation and inter-connection between artists in all fields in order to achieve unity between them:

Being fully aware of the ties of special relations, common characteristics and similar systems founded on the creed of Art which bind them; and

In conformity with the Charter of the Federation of Gulf Artists which calls for the realization of closer relations and stronger bonds; and

Having the conviction that coordination, cooperation, and integration between them serve the sublime objectives of the GCC; and,

In order to channel their efforts to reinforce and serve Gulf and Artistic causes.

An international collective started in 2012, Shanzhai Biennial is an art-fashion crossover “meta-brand” co-directed by Cyril Duval, Babak Radboy and Avena Gallagher. Self-described as “a multinational brand posing as an art project posing as a multinational brand posing as a biennial,” their name refers to the Chinese phenomenon of shanzhai – the imitation and pirating of popular, often prohibitively expensive, brands.

As the critic Harry Burke notes, Shanzhai Biennial frames “the meta-signifying structure of the brand as a condition of contemporary creative production, and questions what autonomy can be found within that”. Each project is designated as a biennial: Shanzhai Biennial No. 1 launched a campaign for an imagined fashion line at Beijing Design Week in 2012. Shanzhai Biennial No. 2, included in the seminal group exhibition ProBio curated by Josh Kline at MoMA P.S.1, consisted of a LED curtain which looped a video of actress, model and “conceptual artist” Wu Ting Ting lip-syncing distorted Mandarin lyrics to a version of Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U. In Shanzhai Biennial No. 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace, 2014, they attempted to sell a £32,000,000 mansion, 100 Hamilton Terrace, London, in their booth with Project Native Informant at the Frieze Art Fair in London. 

Shanzhai culture’s cute consumer goods make apparent the otherwise invisible, and always volatile, relations underlying any trade. Shanzhai Biennial’s artworks ride on this, yet suggest that if the current end point of cultural production is the reproduction of the event as image, then, in the emancipatory logic of pirating, this image, and in turn the social formation that it stands in for, can be reimagined.