Friedman Benda is pleased to present OrtaMiklos: 6 acts of confinement, the first US solo exhibition of the French and Danish creative duo. In 6 acts of confinement, OrtaMiklos debuts a new body of work divided into six discrete scenes with each act representing a different emotional response to this current moment in time.

“It’s during a moment of lockdown that the mind wants to escape. Perhaps it escapes into forms that appear to be unknown, the same as where we feel our future is going,” says OrtaMiklos.

The show will feature collaborations and a curated selection of works with artists including Bráulio Amado, Coady Brown, Salomé Chatriot, Sarah Faux, Jānis Melderis and Reginald Sylvester II creating a multidisciplinary experience. Since many of OrtaMiklos’ ideas begin in guerrilla performances, the additional objects are conceived as props for an intuitive theater of making, utilizing ad hoc sculpting and coloring processes. Through explosively energetic and imaginative objects, OrtaMiklos draw from a wide variety of references, such as body movements and contortion, graffiti, and animation.

As a digital extension of the exhibition, OrtaMiklos have collaborated with digital artist Janis Melderis, composer Amédée De Murcia, and writer Richard Johnston Jones to realize a virtual occupation of the Temple of Dendur, the ancient monument that now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taking this currently unvisitable site as a stage of imaginative operation, OrtaMiklos and their team have created an arresting video, combining animation and performance, which confronts the alienating experience of the current pandemic. Ricocheting through the disturbing psychological terrain of the present, they also riff on the past – Pop Art and radical design practice – while giving some indication of their own future travel.

ABOUT ORTAMIKLOS

Leo Orta (b. 1993, Paris) and Victor Miklos Andersen (b. 1992, Kalundborg) formed OrtaMiklos in 2015 while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Generally informed by natural habitats and processes, the creative duo’s experimental approach activates their design works from the existing norms. Their works have been exhibited in international museums, such as Icebergs In Progress at Museo Marino Marini in Florence (2018), in From Dusk to Dawn at K11 Art Foundation – Guangzhou (2019), in Foncteur d’oubli, at Le Plateau Frac Ile-de-France and Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colors in Design at Design Museum in Ghent (2020) and will be on view at Le Tripostal in Lille. OrtaMiklos currently operates the studio across two locations in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and Les Moulins, France.