For its 4th year, ‘DESERT X’, the ‘Desert Biennial’, brings together the best international artists in the Coachella Valley. DESERT X wants to be a place for people to meet and exchange, where art creates a new perspective on this valley and its social, economic and environmental challenges. The desert is an ideal meeting place for utopias and dystopias. Nineteen artists have been dispersed across the valley, including the Danish collective SUPERFLEX with its installation ‘Dive-in’, an underwater drive-in and light-hearted nod to global warming, which is set to plunge this valley underwater in the future, just as it was in the distant past.
DESERT X is also an opportunity to see the famous ‘Western Flag’ by the artist John Gerrard, which is no mere video but a powerful algorithm that plunges us into Texas, into the heart of the first American oil find, its site now abandoned. The oil responsible for global warming, represented here in all its darkness, is the indelible stain coming to soil the blinkers and the denial into which part of America is plunged.

DESERT X, from 9 February to 21 April 2019, Coachella Valley, CA

Alice Audouin and Lisa Toubas 

March 2019

Crédit : SUPERFLEX, “Drive-in” view, photo : Lance Gerber