This spring, YveYANG Gallery will present your golf course made my GPU, a show of new artwork by Sam Ghantous that engages with issues currently seizing headlines across the world. These glittering objects mine subjects as diverse as video games, global logistics, and renaissance paintings, dredging our contemporary moment to reincorporate its material substrate.
At the core of the show is your golf course made my GPU (2025), a three-channel video that weaves together industrial footage with advertisements for luxury hotels in the imperfectly buffering reality built by today's technology. Ghantous churns through references like the trawlers scooping the ocean floor in his film. "Tiger Woods cuts through pulverized digital promises," synthetic narrators intone over footage of the fallen hero, trapped in the dunes at the Augusta National Golf Club. His plight is contrasted with the planet’s unstoppable momentum.
The film is paired with two-dimensional works that, like the film, seek to reunite circuits with their geological lineage. These UV prints on silicon wafers resemble giant microchips, cut with mutant reimaginings of art history.
"In many ways, I empathize with the sand depicted in this show," Ghantous said. "I was born in Oman, and like many in my generation, my childhood was subject to the migration of global capital. I felt perpetual displacement and transformation as my family moved to locations across the Middle East and eventually to North America."
The silica used to create the graphics processing chips that power the boom in so-called artificial intelligence was forged by millions of years of erosion and transport. Like this itinerant sand, Ghantous excels at hallucinations governed by dream logic.
The artist has navigated the currents of global upheaval, moving between countries, institutions, and career paths, from architect to artist. These milieus might be considered structured and elite, yet within this sandstorm of displacement, the artist’s sense of being lost is akin to a grain of sand. Small, transient, and uncertain.
Ghantous’s work is neither a manifesto nor an assertion of self-importance. It lingers in a state of fluidity, capturing the ambiguity of individual existence within historical forces.
Much like the fragmented and abstract frames in his video—gliding from one moment to the next—his work prompts us to consider: What role does an individual play in the vast currents of history in a global context? What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from this arcane passage from mineral to binary? And ultimately, who are you?
Sam Ghantous (b. 1989, Muscat, Oman) is an artist based in Zürich. He holds a Master of Architecture from MIT and currently teaches in the Chair of Rosa Barba at ETH Zürich. He has taught at Cornell, University of Toronto, and MIT and ETH. His work has been shown at Postmasters Gallery, with ZKM at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, ASSAB One in Milan, MODEL Festival in Barcelona, and the OōEli Art Park in Hangzhou. He is a co-founder of FOREIGN OBJECTS, a multidisciplinary design and research studio that has won the NEW INC Residency, and the Bard Digital Artist in Residency, and presented work with the New Museum and Rhizome.
Opening Reception:
05.02.2025, 6-8 PM