Antoine Catala

Biography

Antoine Catala is obsessed with the banal, everyday use of the tools we use to communicate. He looks at platforms or devices, and scrutinizes how they are used to communicate, or more often than not miscommunicate. At the center of all Catala does is language. New platforms of communication (such as twitter, text messages, blogs) allow language to evolve in radical new ways (emojis stand in for words, written messages get shorter and shorter, audio or videos augment text).

Language has always had a profound symbiotic bond with technology. Catala uses technology, often crude or anachronistic, to epitomize the transformations of the new technologies. The given implication is that the new communication technologies in turn transform language, and therefore us. Catala’s position is more ambiguous. In his words: “In studying these new forms of language I am interested not so much in what is changing or lost within us each time we adopt a new mode of communication, but what remains, what is fixed and in that, what makes it uniquely, deeply human about the way we communicate.”

As time progresses, Catala says he is getting more and more fascinated in how art exists in a room, and the feelings - often alienating - attached to an exhibition and an exhibition space.

Notable Solo Exhibitions

Alphabet at 47 Canal (New York, 2020)

Packaging or Envelopes. All Feelings Disintegrate Up Close at Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles, 2019)

Jardin Synthétique à l’isolement at Musée D’Art Contemporain (Lyon, 2015)

Antoine Catala: Distant Feel, curated by Tina Kukielski and Alex Klein at Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, 2015)

Notable Group Exhibitions

May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th Venice Biennale 2019, curated by Ralph Rugoff (Venice, 2019)

I Was Raised on the Internet at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, 2018)

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today at The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston (Boston, 2018)

Nam June Paik Award at Westfälischer Kunstverein (Münster, 2018)

Suspended Animation at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, 2016)

Public Collections Include

Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh)

Centre Pompidou (Paris)

FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims)

Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (Lyon)

Whitney Museum of Art (New York)

Press

He has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, The Guardian, Art in America, frieze, The New Yorker, The New York Times, among others