In 2023, Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu opened two shows along the Eastern Seaboard. Infra-Specter, currently on view at the Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Civic Floor, at the MIT List Center. Deftly interweaving sculpture, installation, sound, and video, Tieu’s work exists equally in the interpretation of facts, testing of realities, discovery of obfuscations, and awareness of social control.
LIKE SO MUCH ART of the present, the work of Sung Tieu necessitates a fair amount of explanatory text. Reading the growing body of writing about Tieu (the artist will open her first US solo exhibitions “Infra-Specter” at Brooklyn’s Amant on March 30, “Civic Floor” at Cambridge’s MIT List Visual Arts Center on April 4 nearly concurrently), I was struck by the frequency with which the Cold War surfaced as a referent. The term rightly identifies the period about which much of the artist’s research is conducted, but also slyly tethers her object of study to her own artistic operations. The Cold War
The internet is an amazing tool for the spreading of information. Before the twentieth century, the only contact a person could have with a distant event