The Shed:
Fragile Future

In Fragile Future, multidisciplinary artists DRIFT transform The Shed with sound, movement, and film. Their experiential installations play on our senses and help us imagine positive, alternative solutions to the problems our planet faces. DRIFT’s monumental exhibition and series of special experiences inspire a reconnection to our planet and its natural processes, as well as empathy towards nonliving objects.

Featuring a soundtrack created by ANOHNI, Fragile Future takes audiences on a journey through a series of interconnected installations, exploring the universal desire to seek out connection and the power to be found in relinquishing control when embracing change. Since their early careers, DRIFT’s founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta have addressed urgent environmental themes in their work in order to challenge their audiences to think differently about their connections to Earth. The exhibition’s installations—from multitudes of shimmering lights that traverse the gallery like glowing seeds caught in the wind to massive concrete blocks, or Drifters, that magically float on air—offer a hopeful atmosphere for imagining a different world.

On select dates, Drifters becomes a surreal immersive experience that spans The Shed’s four-story-high, 17,000-square-foot McCourt space. In this unique experience, a congregation of Drifters dances on the air in an ethereal atmosphere, in counterpoint to a soundtrack by ANOHNI.

Design Miami/Basel:
Shy Synchrony

Dutch design office Studio Drift and Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto have designed an installation where flower-like lamps rise and fall within a “forest” of wooden beams. Occupying the entrance to this year’s edition of Design Miami/Basel, the installation combined two works: Shy Synchrony, by Studio Drift, and Forest of Space, by Fujimoto.

Shy Synchrony showcased Shylight, a suspended textile lamp that is programmed to continuously rise and fall, creating an opening and closing motion that is reminiscent of flowers blossoming. Here, dozens of these lights were grouped together and choreographed so that they moved in synchronisation. With the work, Studio Drift aims to encourage people to be more aligned with the rhythms of the natural world.

TIMES SQUARE ARTS:
Drifters

Massive concrete blocks drift through the surreal and dreamlike natural landscapes of the Scottish Highlands in Drifters, the new Midnight Moment by artist duo DRIFT (Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta) with filmmaker Sil van der Woerd. DRIFT and van der Woerd’s Midnight Moment is co-presented with Creative Exchange Agency, a creative and cultural agency representing multidisciplinary artists across the fields of art, culture, design, photography, and film.

One moss-covered block floats through a forest; another emerges, dripping, from a peaceful lake; still another hovers above sheer cliffs and remote greenery. Juxtaposed against the natural backdrop, the constructs represent life-forms attempting to find purpose and context within a world to which they don’t belong. As they travel through misty vistas and the ruins of cities, thousands of these blocks eventually come together, seamlessly integrating into a built structure, offering up questions about whether the individual can truly disengage from the collective. Synchronized on over 80 electronic billboards each night in December, the film both contrasts and connects to the built environment of Times Square.

These floating concrete blocks have come to define DRIFT’s oeuvre, which uses kinetic and experiential work to illuminate parallels between human behaviour, technology and nature.

Drifters is included in DRIFT’s current solo exhibition titled ‘Fragile Future’ at The Shed, presented by Superblue and The Shed. In the exhibition, the artists take audiences on a journey through a series of interconnected installations – exploring the universal search for origin, destination, and connection, as well as the power to be found in relinquishing control when embracing change. DRIFT offers hopeful futures and alternative perspectives to our understanding of the Earth’s makeup.

Miami Superblue:
Meadow

In the new experiental museum, Superblue, DRIFT will exhibit our largest scale Meadow to date, launching the Suspension Program, a series of works intended to ‘elicit disbelief and provoke engagement with the ordinary environment, rendered extraordinary’’ alongside immersive installations by Es Devlin, teamLab, and James Turrell, as part of the inaugural opening.

Visitors to the exhibition will be enveloped by Meadow; a sensorial and poetic composition of mechanical flowers which react to their viewer as blossoms to the sun, enacting an organic, ever-changing choreography. Integrated sensors from below the work will translate the presence of the viewer into different moods to create a truly interactive experience. Meadow engages the viewer in symbiosis, evoking the impermanence of nature and the sense of wonder that comes from being immersed in it.