Daniel Giles

tekenen , installatie , Geschiedenis , Dekolonisatie , Conceptueel , collage , Audiovisueel , Artistiek onderzoek

My artistic practice explores how identity becomes embedded within visual and performative practices. My works often create connections with historical figures, events, and ideas through methods of appropriation, abstraction, and research. In my practice, creative interventions into cultural archives create critical space from which to reveal hidden narratives, gain new knowledge, and propose different modes of relation between self, other, and society. My work as an artist and researcher brings together different modes of knowledge production, cultural archives, and platforming the work of others through ongoing interdisciplinary exchange and experimental approaches.
My work explores how visual culture and systems of representation shape our understanding and performances of identity and how historical narratives are recast through contemporary media. Working between practices including painting, performance sculpture and installation, I work through material practice, research, and collaboration to explore and unsettle narratives of race and power. I am interested in exploring the conditions through which we see and are seen and what the mediums and spaces of visual perception can tell us about the systems that structure history and society. My current research practice scales between investigations of spatial and visual practices through archival research, the study of modern architecture, and contemporary approaches to literature, performance, and sound.
Drawing on the strategies and methods of the Black radical tradition, my work is informed by practices of refusal, tactical illegibility, abstraction, and protest, all of which serve to question and disrupt dominant narratives and systems that define identity within racial and gendered hierarchies. Working through and around aesthetic traditions of representation my work enacts an epistemological critique of Western visuality as a system deeply embedded within legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

**Impersonal Generative Power to Bestow Gifts of Grace (mat riviere remix), 2024.** - 3:32 minute single-channel video with sound. Music by mat riviere. This music video uses found footage, images shot in-camera and imagery from years of my artistic practice and research and reshapes them into a dissonant hallucinatory trance. The video was commissioned by Rami George for their project Virtues Remixed & Reinterpreted, a 17 track remix album by 15 different musicians with music videos by 17 different artists and collaborative duos.

**Untitled (Covering), 2026.** - Acrylic, modeling paste and India ink on canvas. 60cmx80cm. This body of work thinks through surface as an abstract ciper for identity. The paintings are based off of observations of architecture and textiles from Europe, Africa, and the United States. The black monochrome provides a visual paradigm signifying art historical teleologies and brings the senses of vision and touch into closer proximity.

**Untitled (construct), 2024.** - graphite and inkjet print on paper, wood frame with acrylic, pumice and graphite powder. 23cm x 33cm. In Constructs I approach collage through found imagery as a codex of racial tropes. I collect, fragment, and recombine images using drawing techniques and an inkjet printer, replicating the flatness of the mechanical print.

**Cut, 2026.** - Graphite powder on mdf board, inkjet on paper, thumbtack, acrylic, graphite powder. 80cm x 120cm.

**Untitled, 2024-2026.** - Inkjet prints on paper and tracing paper. Dimensions variable. These drawings are part of an ongoing research of the artistic and cultural milieu surrounding Josephine Baker in 1920’s Europe. “Le Tumulte Noire”, a portfolio of lithographs by Paul Colin, commemorated the impact of Baker’s performance in Paris, through her infamous dances such as the Charleston. The portfolio illustrates the cast of performers, celebrities and socialites who frequented the jazz clubs and bars where Baker performed. However, in the drawings of Colin, their white bodies are literally blackened by the Black culture they are consuming. Mydrawings insert the Adolf Loos, Paul Colin, and other artists notable for their artistic depictions of Baker into the thrall of this “Black craze”, alongside other image fragments drawn from the research.

**Josephine's: Prelude (installation view), 2026.** - Josephine’s:brings together the process and findings of a multi-year research project on the Baker House, its modernist architect Adolf Loos, and its inspiration, the iconic entertainer Josephine Baker. The installation is an accumulation of material experiments on paper, ceramics, and textiles by Daniel Giles, made in response to archival and field research. This presentation serves as a prelude to afuture speculative staging of the house, with parts of the research coming to life and underpinned by a critique of modernist conceptions of race and gender. In the project, the roles of Baker and Loos in the advent of early 20th-century modernist ideals are explored through a study of primitivism, international style architecture, and jazz aesthetics. Josephine’s: Prelude is the result of research carried out at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York City Public Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the collection of The Albertina Museum Vienna. The research also consisted of site visits to the Paris location for which the house was designed, Baker’s Château des Milandes family home in the French commune of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, as well as properties designed by Loos, including the Tristan Tzara House in Paris,Villa Müller in Prague, and Villa Winternitz in Vienna.

**Untitled (study for Fantastico), 2026.** - Jacquard woven fabric over wooden frame. 142cmx42cmx3cm Adolf Loos often used exotic materials such as cippolino marble in his interior spaces. Natural materials such as these allowed for the architect who railed against ornamentation as degenerate, femanine and racially other, to nonetheless indulge in it via so-called “honest” materials. This work pushes against the modernist edict of “truth to materials” by interpreting marble through the woven textile.

**Hyper-Revue á Grand Spectacle (installation view), 2026.** - Wall drawing with graphite and charcoal.90cmx110cm Only a handful of drawings and a single model for the Baker House exist today. Adolf Loos’ design envisioned a monumental edifice in Paris’ 16th Arrondissement, with alternating black and white stripes of marble covering it’s facade. The outlandish design is also distinguished by a 2-floor internal swimming pool, perforated with glass mirrors at the bottom, allowing a viewer to witness the spectacle of the swimming body. This work uses the architecture of the exhibition space to combine aspects of the research. A rendering of Loos’ model for the Baker House is juxtaposed with text from an advertisement for Folies Bergère, the famous club in Paris where Josephine Baker performed some of her most well-known acts.

**To Resist is to Become a Conductive Thread, 2025.** - password: CBP104 Single-channel video with sound, 36 mins. To Resist is to Become a Conductive Thread is feature-length experimental film that assembles the words and sounds of poets, theorists, artists, and musicians responding to USCBP surveillance drone footage taken during the Minneapolis uprisings of 2020. Amid the uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, US Customs and Border Protection flew a predator drone over the city of Minneapolis to surveil the events on the ground from 20,000 feet in the sky. The drone footage was made available through a FOIA request in 2020. Using the footage in its entirety as a framework, we invite poets, artists, musicians, and scholars to contribute words, sounds, and atmospheres that respond to and complicate the image of the film to illuminate its broader contexts. The resulting work will live as a feature-length experimental film, an auditory publication in the form of a limited edition vinyl record, and a printed publication containing full text of contributors words and additional commissioned texts, allowing this document to proliferate and become embedded in historical, civic, and cultural archives. The film includes voices from: Fred Moten, Simone Browne, Tina Campt, Benjamin Krusling, Neta Bomani, Krista Franklin, Harmony Holiday, and musicians Ben Lamar Gay, JJJJJerome Ellis.

**Enfilade (1), 2025** - Copper saturation glaze on stoneware tiles. 100cmx120cmx2cm. Enfilade reimagines the installation of mirrors within the in domestic interior spaces designed by Adolf Loos. Enfilade refers to the architectural technique of rooms arranged in alignment, creating continuous mirrored space.

**Enfilade (2), 2025.** - Platinum luster on stoneware tiles. 100cmx120cmx2cm.

**Masque Réfléchissant Sans Visage, 2024.** - Platinum luster on glazed stoneware. 27cmx16x7cm. In 1926, May Ray photographed Kiki Montparnasse for Paris Vogue. In the picture, her head is posed next to a dark wooden mask originating from the Baule people in Côte d’ivoire. The title of the photo “Noire et Blanche” makes an obvious reference to the black and white medium of photography and underscores the European obsession with race at the time.

**Griekse Ornament, 2024.** - Glazed stoneware. 60cm. This work appropriates drawings of Greek ornamental patterns made by Adolf Loos during his studies during which he failed his drawing class. In his 1908 manifesto, Loos derided ornament as wasteful and degenerate--the province of the feminine and the racial other.