Detail of Korean Pavilion by Mass Studies

Decades ago, long before an architect could tweet his latest design to bloggers and PR people, world’s fairs were a big deal. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago for six months in 1893, attracted 27 million people, about half the U.S. population at the time. Any kid living in or around New York City in 1939 or 1964 no doubt begged his parents for a ticket to the two world’s fairs in Queens. But ask someone today how psyched they are for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, and you’re bound to get a blank stare. While world’s fairs have long since lost their cachet, countries are still sponsoring praiseworthy pavilions. Here are the ones we think will make the biggest splash in Shanghai.

Still from Meet the Eye, 2009. Courtesy of Aїda Ruilova and Salon 94, New York.

Aїda Ruilova is no stranger to the voyeuristic, often macabre storytelling devices made famous by experimental film icons Sergei Eisenstein and Maya Deren. Influenced equally by structural cinema of the 1960s and vampire movies of the 1970s, the New York-based filmmaker-artist appears at home working with contrasting styles. Ruilova’s short films employ a series of B-movie horror tactics, avant-garde editing, and abstract montages of gesture and sound. The repetitive use of fragmented dialogue (“Which one is me?”) and symbolic imagery (peepholes and basements) add complicated layers of self-awareness to people caught in nightmarish situations. Despite the filmmaker’s mysterious characters and affinity for disorientation, the work is not without pathos. Viewers find themselves slyly twisted into the role of witness and accomplice, furthering the eerie spectrum of the camera’s gaze. Meet the Eye is Ruilova’s latest work, created as part of the Hammer Museum’s Artist Residency Program and appropriately shot in Los Angeles with two of the city’s cult figures. Artist Raymond Pettibon and fringe-actress Karen Black play a couple trapped in a hotel room. The film treads a thin line between mental confusion and sheer illusion. Pettibon monotones the same lines over and over, Black anguishes theatrically about the room, attempting to recall a fatal memory just beyond her grasp.

Photography courtesy of Santiago Vanegas

It’s been seven months since I returned from Antarctica and I still can’t fathom that I was there. It’s like going to another planet. Not that I’ve been to another planet, but I can imagine that this is the closest I’ll ever get to one. Ironically, being in Antarctica has probably been the closest I’ve felt to Earth. The experience of being there has generated a series of extreme opposing images. First, there’s the scale: massive landscape, tiny human. And then there’s the sobering inverse: towering human threat to nature, delicate and vulnerable, polar (global) ecology. There was also the unforgiving Drake Passage crossing, our 240-foot ship at the mercy of thirty- to fifty-foot waves. Life, death. The list goes on. It’s humbling. People ask me, “Why go to Antarctica?” There are many reasons. Some of which I have yet to discover. I wanted to go to Antarctica because soon it will be a different place. Just in the last few years, ice shelves the size of entire countries have broken off the continent and are melting into the ocean. Antarctica is dying. I had to go, absorb, and tell a story. And then, of course, there’s the magnificence of Antarctica. Such an unlikely and complex place. I guess you could say that my reasons for going are Death and Beauty.

Embroidery never seemed as dark and suggestive as in the art of London-based Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri. In his meticulous work, he transforms old discarded family photographs into three-dimensional objects with intense psychological evocations. “The intimate human action of embroidery is a ritual of making and reshaping stories and the history of these people,” he says. Anzeri uses synthetic hair as his thread of choice, which he stitches and sews to create a material and metaphorical medium representing bodily boundaries and biographies. The portraits he creates are both beautiful and unnerving. Masked faces of someone’s long-forgotten relatives radiate new expression, which reinvents old stories through an unexpected and new visual language. Last year, Anzeri was selected as one of thirty emerging artists to be considered for the 2008 Sovereign European Art Prize, and recently his work was added to the renowned Saatchi Online Collection, a digital platform for upcoming young talents. This fall, he‘ll be showing alongside six other artists who explore the bounderies of conventional photography, titled Starting With a Photograph, at the Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London from September 10 – October 12.

XL Recordings

Jack Peñate is desperate for you to forget his first album, Matinee, and focus on his new one. In case the message wasn’t clear enough, it is right there in the title, Everything Is New. Peñate has reinvented himself as a brand new entity. Gone is the self-indulgent, snobbish, and superior attitude of the debut. In its place is carefully crafted modern-day soul — not in the conventional sense, however, but the British interpretation of it. This means emotive vocals that aren’t overwrought with vibrato. Rather, Peñate showcases his vocal abilities with empathy and genuineness of emotion that have no choice but to ring true. Afrobeats, handclaps, and scatterings of a gospel choir charge these tastefully melodic songs. Driving world rhythms are the identifiers of “Let’s All Die” and “Give Yourself Away”. But it is the heralding horns and tough dance pace of “Be The One” and the bold statements of “Tonight’s Today”, balanced against island-tinged percussion, that give the album its bite. With Everything Is New, Peñate has redeemed himself enough to inspire us to hit “reset” where he’s concerned.

Simon-Pierre Toussaint took not one but two prizes at the Hyères International Fashion and Photography Festival this past spring for his menswear collection, “The trees can hear you if you talk to them”. Boy scouts and the male adolescent experience are points of reference for his work, an imaginative spin on practical outdoor wear. It was the twenty-fourth year for the festival at Hyères, which is held at the early modernist villa Noailles in the south of France and focuses on emerging fashion designers and photographers. This year’s fashion jury included artist Nan Goldin and Jefferson Hack, founder of Dazed and Confused, among others.
     Toussaint, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp last year, says that the boy scouts and simple childhood pastimes like playing with wooden knights are what inspired his collection. Like boyhood camping and acting out Medieval battles, his designs are playful but not whimsical. They are inventive, dreamy solutions for surviving outdoors. Take for example his ankle-length parka, pieced together from sleeping bags and lined with nighttime constellations; this huge cape parka is shown over white long johns that look old-school backwoods, except for the stark geometric designs that wrap suggestively around the hips.

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IAMSOUND Records

With just an EP to her name, Anita Blay has immediately garnered comparisons to Santigold for both her work with Santi producer Radioclit and, moreover, a comparable skill for churning out eclectic and electric party starters set to buoyant synths, grinding bass, and penetrating hooks. Pulsing at the heart of these four songs, of course, is the 23-year-old’s sinister siren’s call of a voice. “Clean Apart” (streamed below) serves up Prince-esque flourishes of intergalactic funk while Blay subverts the usual narrative of adultery/break-up tracks with a snarling, empowered reprimand to her ex-to-be. Meanwhile the hypnotic beats and digitized chimes on “I’m Not Sorry” recall Madonna’s forays in Euro-dance, tinged with a barbed ferocity that seems certain to become thecocknbullkid’s hallmark.

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thecocknbullkid – Clean Apart

There are some inspirational, off-beat composers out there. Namely the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra — playing on carrot-flutes and radish-marimbas — and Joseph Bertolozzi, who turned the entire Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge into a gigantic percussion instrument. And then there was David Byrne’s installation last year, Playing the Building. Most recently, composer and sound designer Diego Stocco appeared on our radar. With an eminently creative mind, Stocco builds music out of ingenious objects like sand and burning pianos. For his latest project he turned to a sprawling old tree in his own backyard.
     “In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs,” he writes on his website. “It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.”
     It turns out he could, so he did, and with no other means than a pencil sharpener, two microphones, and a customized stethoscope he made a track simply by thumbing and shaking the tree. The pencil sharpener was used to trim the twigs so that Stocco could tune them. Connected to a plastic pipe on one end and a microphone on the other, the stethoscope then transmitted the sounds Stocco created. The final version of the track has not been processed or digitally edited in any way. “All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on,” Stocco explains.

No contemporary clothing brand — with the obvious exception of Maison Martin Margiela — is cloaked in quite so much mystery as the Deth Killers of Bushwick. Eight years ago, the Brooklyn-based atelier made its debut as “Inner City Raiders vs. Deth Killers”, purportedly named after the centuries-old violence raging between two of the borough’s most notorious gangs. According to legend (available in its entirety on DethKillers.com), the gang leaders, exhausted after years of unremitting battle, drew up a peace treaty stipulating not only the end of their bloody turf war, but the creation of a fashion company. The mega-brand they summoned “would combine and capitalize on the clubs’ exquisite and deadly senses of style. Styles of dress so sexy, they were known to lure Mamasitas, Hoochie Mamas, and Rock Goddesses from all five boroughs.” And it was so.
     The Deth Killers spent three glorious years on the periphery of mainstream fashion — outfitting David Bowie in tight jeans and punk rock jackets for his 2003 “Reality Tour” — only to disappear altogether a year later. The circumstances surrounding the brand’s dissolution remain unclear: “If you happen to be wondering where the Deth Killers have been for the last few years, it’s a long story,” states their new website. “You might want to go to the bathroom now, because it’s very long and very boring.”