Brilliant Ideas Episode #17: Simon Denny

The Innovator’s Dilemma, which is the above-introduced exhibition of the artist, is one of the most appealing exhibitions held at MoMA PS1 last year: the work includes about 50 pieces of plane artworks, 15 pieces of sculpture, and installation works arranged here and there within the display space, somewhat like a museum. One of the most striking pieces is New Management(2014), which is a composed stage that looks like an alter but is in fact a kind of a filming site formed after a VIP room of a hotel in Frankfurt, Germany.
This room is where a CEO of a company, who had announced a drastic change of the firm, had once told to his employees to “Change everything but your spouse and kids.” Interested in the room that was the place where the start of the new growth and the birth of the philosophical value of a company were declared, Denny chose the hotel room as a meaningful place for his work. He reproduced the interior of the room including all the decorations, flowers, and paintings based on the picture of the place he obtained after hard efforts. Over the outdoor air conditioner fan operating slowly in a corner of the display space shows the slogans of the company, such as “Time for Smart Changes,” “When the group changes, the society changes.”

Denny discovers fascinating points in unique culture of companies based on the Internet and technologies, situations following deterioration of state-of-the-art technologies, various corporate cultures, and the structure of the contemporary national identity. In particular, he concentrates his interest and attention on the stories of the U.S. Silicon Valley, which is filled with cutting edge IT companies. Major strengths of the fast-emerging, start-up companies, that sometimes suffer upon their start shadowed by other companies or sometimes rise from such crises, are dazzling ideas, new management mindsets, and the ability to form groups fast. Expressing these traits of the start-up companies in witty videos or installation works, the artist showed Secret Power(2015) at the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015.

He induces the viewers to experience the high technologies in the works, and to concentrate on a series of relationships between geology, knowledge, and power displayed in the pieces applied with advanced technologies.
As seen above, the recent studies of the artist are focused on the revolution and deterioration of technologies, the neo-liberalistic culture, and the Internet. Enjoying interpretation with infinite potential through the process of an allegory in which all the elements above nest in a certain place and expand being mixed and reconstituted along with other elements, Simon Denny is a true high technology explorer. ■ with ARTINPOST

A sculptor and installation artist Simon Denny was born in 1982, in New Zealand. His works are inspired from advertisements and packaging produced by media companies and technology. To highlight connections between the utopian goals of the new media economy and historical modernism, the artist makes use of graphic interfaces borrowed from display in commercial exhibitions. Through his installation pieces that combines sculpture, graphics, and moving images, he expresses his perspective on the role of technology in shaping the culture of our time and the ways information is shared and controlled.
Simon Denny, who now lives and works in Berlin, has been actively working in the global art scene. He presented his works at the Aspen Art Museum in the US, Kunstverein Munich in Germany and numerous museums over the world. He was invited to the 2008 Sydney Biennale and the 2009 Brussels Biennale and won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2012. Denny is receiving ever more attention since being selected as the representative artist of the New Zealand Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.