Nikita Gale

Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. The artist holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA.

Gale’s work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist’s practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.

Gale’s practice examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Gale’s broad-ranging installations – often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting – blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. By approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated.

The artist’s work has recently been exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial (New York); Chisenhale (London); LAXART (Los Angeles); 52 Walker (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin); Swiss Institute (New York); California African American Museum (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).

Gale is represented by Petzel (New York), 56 Henry (New York), Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles), and Emalin (London).

Nikita Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita is a Contributing Editor at Triple Canopy, a magazine and publishing platform based in New York City and a former board member of GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems. Currently, Gale serves on the Artist Advisory Councils of the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is a member of The Salmon Creek Farm Community Council. In 2024, Gale received the Whitney Museum’s prestigious Bucksbaum Award.

Zoé Whitley In Conversation With Nikita Gale

Curated this month in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London, directed by Zoé Whitley, Nikita Gale’s new series of films for CIRCA titled ‘SOME WEATHER’ spotlight the creative labour of Black women whose voices feature in some of rock music’s most acclaimed recordings, from the Rolling Stones to David Bowie.

Four films titled ‘Heat’, ‘Fog’, ‘Blizzard’, and ‘Rain’ will feature on the CIRCA platform throughout June 2021, appearing daily with the unpredictability of weather patterns. Each film takes on a different radiant hue, employing the immensity of these cities’ advertising screens to shift the atmosphere of their respective urban settings.

Zoé Whitley: Before we’d met, I’d already encountered your writings about listening as a political act. Drawing on the research of Prof Kate Lacey, you’ve focused on how the freedom to listen is not just about freedom of speech, but is fundamental to ensuring many voices are heard. How did sound come to play such an important role for you as a visual artist?

Nikita Gale: It’s nice to know that the research and writing is finding its way around. It’s always a bit difficult to track how things are resonating with others since digital interactions often feel like projecting into a void. My interest in sound emerged from a more specific interest and exposure to music from an early age. My mother was a music teacher when I was growing up, so there was always a piano in the house; there was always music playing from whatever the most recent stereo system was that my father had brought into the house. My father began his military career as a civil engineer in the Air Force, so there were always little models and drawings of buildings and bridges and other kinds of infrastructures floating around the house. As I entered high school and college, I began recording my own music, mostly very loopy electric guitar compositions that became much more pop-y after college. I was a bedroom musician. I never performed but I had a small following on Myspace and got a little radio play in the mid-00s, haha. After college, I started working in advertising in the buying and planning side, so my job was essentially to make sense of behavioral data and find ways to make that data profitable. So I was working in advertising by day, and started shooting music shows at night, literally. At this point, I was living in Atlanta and was photographing a lot of my friends who were musicians, shooting album covers, press photos; I’d also started a music blog where I’d review singles I was really into. I eventually began experimenting with other mediums but sound always found a way into whatever I was doing.