cv / Bio - Hilary Koob

HILARY KOOB-SASSEN
Koob-Sassen’s technically-intensive hand-production of wrought and reduced marble and steel sculpture tests
physical models of culture in time. In May 2014, he completed the three-year set-up and production of XYZ
TELEONOMY, a monumental phrase of color- and form-coded sculpture. As a Syntactical Elaborationist
Koob-Sassen builds complexity in manageable units whose physics, form and structure accommodate inclusion
in a larger phrase or ecology of meaning. The phrase of XYZ TELEONOMY can be disassembled into its constituent sculptural utterances, but for now it exists in HKS’s studio as an elaborate set of systems scaled and arranged to immerse the reader’s body as both cipher and subject. The sculpture speaks in the universal ancestral
language of physical metaphor to inspire an experience of operational immanence in a garden of systems. Using
the organs of the body as an analogy for an ideal arrangement of world infrastructures, Koob-Sassen assembles
names from the terrains of aesthetics, economics, biology and philosophy to bridge the analogic gap.
Introduced to the public during the Manifesto Marathon and a residency and installation at the Serpentine
Gallery in 2009, three physical metaphors saturate the ecology of Koob-Sassen’s forms: FRANKENSTEIN, THE
SYNTAX OCTOPUS and FILLETVILLE are the hero, chorus and theatre of the transcalar drama his work
poetically propagandizes.
Hilary Koob-Sassen’s book XYZ TELEONOMY: the accumulation of realism, diagrammatically unpacks these
three physical metaphors into econometrics whose X, Y and Z elaborate time in the same way that length,
height and width elaborate space. The book XYZ TELEONOMY formalizes the cross-saturation of topos and
telos in the evidential structures produced by life in time, lyrically theorizing a biological ontology of culture. The
life-furthering raison d’être of culture’s voracity and the mechanistic ubiquity of its collapse also lace HKS’s ten
years of music making with cellist and producer Andreas Köhler as THE ERRORISTS.
The songs of THE ERRORISTS—and the videos they narrate—present as reality-fictions that engineer entry-points into a new culture story from the data, events and conditions of a global human culture teetering
between collapse and renaissance. By seeking traction in specific geopolitical realities the works expand the
ontology of art to include an error-producing function for global human culture.
In his videos and his ongoing project to design and introduce a new type of investment vehicle, Koob-Sassen
proposes the population of artificial frontiers like the web and derivatives with magnificent life-furthering forms
beyond the viral slurry now dominant in those abstract geographies. Koob-Sassen’s work scintillates between
the utter sincerity of its processes and the philosophic jest that is a prerequisite to its quest to shape the metabolic momentums of contemporary global systems into trajectories that unconceal beautiful new aspects of
Life’s ontology.
HILARY KOOB-SASSEN
1975 –New York, US, lives in London, UK
Education
BA Yale University
Awards/Shortlists
2013 –Transcalar Investment Vehicles receives the EMAF Award at its premiere
2011 – Film London, Flamin production grant
2011 – Short-list for the Jarman Award
2010 – Short-list for the Tanner Sculpture Prize
2005 – Short-list for the ZKM Medien Kunst Preis
1997 – Sudler Prize, Yale University
Residencies
2011 –Wysing Arts Center, Cambridgeshire, The Institute of Beyond
2011, 2007, 2003 - ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
2009 – The Serpentine Gallery, London
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2012 – Whitechapel Gallery, London, Transcalar Investment Vehicles preview screening, Q&A with Stuart Comer
2009 – Serpentine Gallery, London, The Syntax Octopus
2009 – Sketch Gallery, London, The Errorists: Faith In Infrastructure, curated by Victoria Brooks,
2007 – T1+2 Gallery, London, Gaia Made It Popular, And Now The Errorists Are Here With New Vernacular
Selected Group Exhibitions
2014 – British Film Institute London Film Festival, UK premiere of Transcalar Investment Vehicles (50 min)
2014 –Tate Britain, Assembly screening of Faith In Infrastructure
2014 – Japanese Media Art Festival, Tokyo, Japan, Transcalar Investment Vehicles jury selection
2013– Wurttemburgischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Everything Happens on the Surface, curated by Katrin Mundt
2013 - European Media Art Festival, EMAF Award
2013 - New Museum Ideas City Festival, New York, outdoor screening of Faith In Infrastructure
2012 - Camberwell College, The Indifference of Objects, curated by Florian Roitmeyer, steel sculpture,
2012 - Camden Arts Center, London, curated by Gina Buenfeld, The Errorists present A Syntax Octopus at the Axes of Pattern and
Phrase, concert with sculpture,
2012 - Banner Repeater, London, Diagramatic Form, curaated by Ami Clarke, Ontological Narrativity video installation
2012 – Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, Mannerist Bollards permanent installation of outdoor steel sculpture
2011 – Whitechapel Gallery, London, Jarman Award Shortlist Exhibition, Noblese Oblige, LSD and Atomic Power in Transcalar Investment Vehicles,
2011 – Faith in Exponential, More Soup and Tart, curated by Rosie Cooper, Barbican Theatre, London
2011 – Circa Projects, Newcastle, Seeing in the Dark, curated by Sam Watson, Adam Phillips and Steven Ball, Noblese Oblige, LSD
and Atomic Power in Transcalar Investment Vehicles
2011 –Barbican Art Gallery, London, Narration Strategy with 7 Harps, part of Sounds & Words, curated by Rosie Cooper,
2011 – Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, Merz World: Yona Friedman & Tomas Saraceno, curated by Adrain Nutz and Maurizio Bortolotti
2011 – Digital Art Centre,Taipei, Taiwan, New Narrative, curated by Ada Kai-Ting Yang
2010 –Wysing Arts Center, Cambridgeshire, The Errorists: Gardener’s Songs, concert, part of Be Glad The Song Has No End, curated
by Andy Holden
2010 – Espace Doll, Lausanne, Switzerland, The Errorists: Chansons De Jardinage concert
2009 – Beijing Film Academy, China, Zaim Artspace Yokohama, Japan, Faith In Infrastructure, Transverse, IDA Projects, curated by Stephen Danzig and Lubi Thomas,
2009 – Athens Biennale, Heaven, curated by Diana Baldon, Greece
2008 – Serpentine Gallery, London, Manifesto Marathon, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, An Errorists’ Manifesto
2008 – ZKM, Karlsruhe and Transmediale 08, Berlin, The Errorists: Game Theory: Tit For Tat, Concerts+video
2007 – BFI Southbank, London, New Lands, curated by William Fowler, The Errorists: 3-Name Phrase, screenings and concert with
video
2007 – South London Gallery, London, The Weasel: Pop Music and Contemporary Art, curated by Kit Hammonds, Concert
2006 – Steiricher Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria, The Dictionary of War, The Errorists: Conditional Surrender to the City of Gardens
2006 - European Media Art Festival, Osnabruecken, Germany
2006 - Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany
2005 – Whitechapel Gallery, London, Lunar, New Work U.K., curated by Stuart Comer
2005 – Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria, Go Between, curated by Peter Lewis and Wolfgang Fetz,
2005 – Redux Gallery, London, By Proxy, curated by Peter Lewis
2005 - European Media Art Festival, Osnabruecken, Germany
2005 - Transmediale Festival , Berlin, Germany
2003 – TU Architecture Faculty, Delft, Netherlands, The Body In Architecture, The Bioengine screening and Supercellularity sculpture
2000 – Exit Art, New York, NEO, curated by Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman, Intuition Triggers 1-56, Sculpture installation with
Anna Ehrsam and performances of The BioEngine with Jen Mitas, NYTimes review
1999 – Lombard Fried Gallery, New York, Urban Romantics, curated by Nancy Chaiken,
Curated Projects
2011 – Kunsthalle Exnergasse WUK, Vienna, Austria, Songs of the Swamp/ Lieder aus dem Morast, group show curated and designed
by HKS with Rosie Cooper,
2004 – The Pattern of the Plans and the Lack of Plan Plan, and Conference Towards a Syntactical Elaborationism, curated by HKS and
Rut Blees Luxemburg, T1+2 Artspace, London
Catalogues/Books
2012 – Premature Surrender to Systemic Momentum, FR David, Issue #9
2009 – Heaven, 2nd Athens Biennial, For the Straight Way is Lost, Diana Baldon
2009 –-Transmediale 09 Deep North Parcours 2, editor Thomas Munz,
2008 – Faith In Infrastructure: an Errorist Manifesto, Manifesto Marathon Book, Serpentine Gallery, editor Hans Ulrich Obrist
2006 – Conditional Surrender To The City Of The Gardens, Dictionary of War, Merve Verlag, editor Florian Schneider
2006 – Poster “Design Competition for a World Subway System”, Zeitschrift Magazine, Tiffany Issue, Austria
2005 –The Elaboration of Culture is towards M.T.I.E, Go Between, Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria
Publications
2009 – Faith in Infrastructure: an Errorist Manifesto, The Reader, Guestroom, London
2005 – The Errorists: Delightfully Unfascistic on the Inside, song on CD curated by Tobias Meyer and Anna Collins, Static Commotion,
Issue #4, Guestroom, London
2002 –The Body of Institutional Pivots and Living Potential, The Body in Architecture, TU Delft Faculty Magazine, Netherlands

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