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Superhero Sighting Society, 2019
Together with Sabih Ahmed

mixed media installation


Superhero Sighting Society gathers witness accounts of superhero sightings from all around the world and presents a scenography by Super Taus. Maintaining anonymity of its members, the Society raises awareness and promotes conversations around new figurations of power that have emerged amidst the seismic planetary and geopolitical shifts of the 21st century. In 2011, while referencing superheroes in an essay titled ‘Is it a Bird? A Plane? No, It’s a Magic Chair’, Lawrence Liang proposed that, “the transformation of Clark Kent into Superman is always precipitated by a crisis, usually one large enough to potentially destroy the world. But what if it is not a monumen- tal end-of-the-world that scares us, but the prospect of losing the small worlds that we inhabit and know: a bookstore disappearing, a public organization running out of funds, an independent gallery shutting down?” This work aims to invoke many such worlds (big and small). It invites all to con- jure images and apparitions from a cacophony of voices; to re-render living environments through a congestion of narratives; and, to propose new morphologies of the contemporary through figures, personas, places and desires.

An impetus behind this work is to open a question that first brought Superhero Sighting Society together: How have different landscapes and geographies demanded different superpowers of the heroes arising from there?
Superhero Sighting Society is conceived by the Society’s Founding Secretary Members, Sabih Ahmed and Taus Makhacheva, in collaboration with the Society’s Records Clerk, Jessica Saxby.
Scenography: Super Taus
Texts: Jessica Saxby
3D visualisation: Nikita Kulchitsky
Sound design: Denis Dronov
Voices: Falak Ali, Ahmed Abouelela, Henriikka Ahtiainen, Roman Bashtovoy, Daniel Begon, Sofia Poppius Brichta, Christopher Caffrey, Mike Cole, Jacob Ferree, Amira Gherbaoui, Ruben Gorkink, Olaoye Tundee Habeeb, Nishida Hidemi, Vojtech Jirka, Michael Koriche, Johan Brink Lorenz, Njegos Manojlovic, Victoria Moya, Martyna Nowinska, Ayodele Oluwaseun, Mary Rose, Talib Shillaev, Marie Vacher, Joa Verrijzer, Natalja Verrijzer, Olyvia Wilde, Xia Yin
Production: Anzhelika Baryshnikova, Clément Caignart, Kristina Chernyavskaya, Corégie Expo, Andrey Efits, Sophie Potelon, Guillaume Thireau
Installation production: Carlo Bas-Sancho, Sasha Dykhne, Mark Kuzin, Mathis Oesterlen, Maria Plavinskaya, Albert Romantsov, Svetlana Yefremova, Mark Yesin
Translation: Pio Abad, Ayò Akínwándé, Abdelmalek Ben Salah, Chen Chen, Alfredo Hubard Escalera, Hiroyuki Kojima, Bruno Leitão, Magda Mietka, Iheanyi On-wuegbucha, Mégane Paradis, Rosa Preuss Ililonga, Lala Rascic, Sini Rinne-Kanto, Jessica Saxby, Ruijun Shen, Jonas Staal Research: Andrey Efits, Katia Porro, Sophie Potelon

Commissioned by KADIST Foundation, production supported by narrative projects, London (2019), The Tetley (2020) and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (2020)
Courtesy of the artist

Sound: https://vimeo.com/439355316/1f1eec7650 Texts: https://clck.ru/39SYZ6

Photo: Sabih Ahmed, Aurélien Mole



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