K. Yoland
Site and non-site: An alternative freedom for the body inside simulations and desertscapes

Summary

Site-specific research of the Southwest deserts of the United States focused on military training, other world simulations, and artist-led land interventions. Navigating state and corporate geographies, Yoland explores desertscapes as a space of territorial conquest. While working on private and public land, Yoland's performances and installations instigate encounters that provide past, present and future readings of power, national identity and colonisation.

Bibliography

K. Yoland is a site-specific and transdisciplinary artist examining territoriality and spatial power across large-scale terrain, urban planning and international borders. Incorporating performance, video, text, installation and photography, the body or its impact is ever-present. Engaging expanded modes of fiction, absurdity and action interventions, Yoland's previous projects have involved a wide range of participants across Europe and the United States. This has included canoeing the Rio Grande whilst debating immigration with a kidnapped tumbleweed inside a bulletproof box; choreographing dancers in a three-hour “war installation” focused on the 2003 televised bombing of Baghdad; performing a choreography of conflict with Olympic fencers on scaffolding; and taking twenty-one different day jobs to explore identity and exclusion across Paris.

Yoland's international exhibitions include Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile), Ringling Museum (Sarasota), Pulse PLAY (Miami), Lisson Gallery (London), Turner Contemporary (Margate), Marfa Contemporary (Texas), Alan Cristea Gallery (London), Talley Dunn Gallery (Texas), Center for Cultural Decontamination (Belgrade), House at the End of the World (Berlin), Plymouth Biennale (UK), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Novosibirsk State Art Museum (Novosibirsk) and Nederland’s Fotomuseum (Rotterdam). Conferences, talks and publications include The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, London School of Economics, Nasher Sculpture Center and Habitat III, United Nations, Quito.

Lecturing in socio-politically engaged art practice and expanded cinema, Yoland has worked with US, UK and French universities. Supporting free education and open dialogue, Yoland produced/hosted Constructive Forces for Resonance 104.4 FM (London), a weekly radio program talking to artists and specialists about social, political and environmental concerns of our time, and previously produced/hosted the daily Talk at Ten, interviewing artists, politicians, activists, and scientists for Marfa Public Radio (West Texas).