Editor’s Picks: Robots, a Rave, and a Great Sculpture Show

Nerding out

Arms, legs, torsos, and heads, connected and disconnected from each other, haphazardly on tables, populate Geumhyung Jeong’s Toys, Selected, a show of her DIY robots at Canal Projects’ main gallery. Activating the medical dummies and prosthetic limbs forged through her own devices in a one-hour performance, Toy Demo, Jeong shared her painstakingly slow timeline of achieving each movement. Then she, using a remote control, demo:d the movement she described. The electric buzz and scratch of the various body parts moving filled the room. It was tedious, humorous, and absolutely brilliant. At one point, Jeong lay on a table, gyrating, recreating one motion she wanted to achieve, and one that she did not. A trained dancer, she captivated the audience, moving with determination through the room from the remote control to the microphone. Her robots do not work efficiently or on tasks, they are there for her pleasure. The connotation of intimacy hung in the air. Children play with dolls while some adults play with sex dolls, and much progress is being made with sexbots. With robotics and AI, which replace human capabilities, there is close proximity not only to redundancy, but also loneliness and alienation. Queer posthumanist discourse approaches this in playful ways, subverting stereotypes of identity. Brittany Nelson uses outer space and the technology humans send there, as a frontier to discuss queer isolation. At the end of her demo, Jeong concluded, “I hope to have time to play with them more together.”

If you are fearful of AI and its embodiment, robots, taking over the world soon, one glance at Jeong’s robots will assure you that we are far off. Let artists and researchers continue having fun while developing these technologies further.

Geumhyung Jeong: Toys, Selected is on view at Canal Projects through July 26, 2025, and Toy Demo was performed on May 23 and 24.

All in at the Danish Rave

“It’s giving Performa vibes,” I told a friend, as we watched Esben Weile Kjær’s performance at Amant’s newly opened East Williamsburg. I liked it. Part of Performa’s mission is to invite non-performing artists to create performance art—visiting a new format, some for the first time. Are they real performance artists? Judgements differ. Kjær’s performance piece, titled PEARL, was marvelously chaotic. A pile of white roses set the stage, performers with roses duct taped to their bodies emerged, running back and forth. Then each repeated a dance motion, over and over, high kick, heel toe, floor roll, and more. Soon oversized sparklers, or mini fireworks, erupted. WTF we thought and danced to the soundtrack by Croatian Amor. The backdrop (apart from the porta potties, security guards, and golden flags flickering in the wind) was SHELL, a large-scale fortress, or castle, but created in two horizontal sections there isn’t really an inside or outside, rather a corridor through. Topped by LED lanterns, it looks medieval, but also like a bounce castle, without the bounce.

This tension between authentic and inauthentic, or mimicry, is what Kjær has become known for. PEARL and SHELL are no exceptions. “This looks just like a party in Denmark where people get fucked up and dance all night,” Anna Sofie Jespersen, a Danish painter commented. But of course, this pseudo rave was actually an art opening with an end time at 10PM. Flamme Eternelle, Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2014 exhibition at Palais de Tokyo which borrowed from a type of protest or Occupy Wall Street aesthetic (or vice versa) and transformed the galleries into a public space where visitors were welcome to host workshops, convene, and create comes to mind. By bringing a rave, a space of letting go, freedom, and transformation, to an art world setting, Kjær subverts both and invites participants to determine how they navigate (in)authenticity. So fun.

My level of participation? Well, Trauma curated the musical performances and I am a Kunt Fetish background dancer now. Period.

Esben Weile Kjær’s SHELL is open through September 28, 2025 at Amant’s lot at 316 Ten Eyck.

Girl Power

In the centre of Stockholm, one of Cajsa von Zeipel’s underwear-clad white figures stands against a pillar, her posture is crouched and head bowed to fit. Too large for the MOOD-mall entrance, but refusing to make herself smaller, unapologetically in her high heeled platforms. von Zeipel was known for these white plaster sculptures of teenage girls and androgynous figures in her early career. They towered over the viewers in museums and in public space as if to say ‘fuck you, we don’t only exist we are bigger and more important than you.’ Then she moved on to humanlike shapes with drawn out, curved, and splayed features, then sprays of color before she moved on to the pardon my French, vomit, she creates today. I use the term endearingly, the maximalist life-like silicone sculptures that incorporate designer ready-mades, existing somewhere between a jarring capitalist nightmare and friends on their way to brunch. Cool and tremendously poignant.

Dash collapses von Zeipel’s past and present in a setting that resembles a warehouse or museum storage space, on fire (the walls ar a yellow-orange hue). New white plaster works are exhibited suspended, standing, and cornered within a two-story wood structure, and off to the side a maximalist silicone piece styled by cool Stockholm-based stylist Christopher Insulander a.k.a @crapdiem. A bride is suspended from the ceiling. Further adding to the chaos and instability, is the video piece Automatic (2006) by Peter Geschwind, one of von Zeipel’s former professors, depicting shadows running across the wall. As the press release states: “What do we salvage from the wreckage and who or what gets to begin again?”

von Zeipel’s manages again to capture lingering dreams that we do not want to abandon, growth, and life’s big moments, seriously and deeply.

Cajsa von Zeipel’s Dash is on view at Company Gallery through June 21, 2025.