Born in 1978 and 1985 in the United States. Live and work between the United States and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Benedict and Rueter’s site-adapted videos, sculptures, and drawings intercept objects and processes that extend beyond one’s peripheral vision. Often working with architectural or infrastructural elements hidden in plain sight, the duo lodges materiality, voice, intimacy, and at times their own bodies, into the heart of abstract and technologically-produced spaces, where such things seem legible only as objects. Troubling contemporary vocabularies of scale, representation, and abstraction with historical specificities, Benedict and Rueter pace into and out of exhibition sites, dragging with them fiber optic cables, misused industrial water bottle preforms, abjected modernist diagrams, and pieces of salvaged flooring. In its circulation, their work accumulates and adjusts as it encounters institutional logics, frictional proximities, hearsay, and fragments of collective imagination.
Benedict and Rueter began their collaborative partnership in Chicago, IL (US) in 2015. Their work has been exhibited in venues such as:
The 34th Bienal de São Paulo, BR / the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, IT / The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL / Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR, USA / Jan Van Eyck Open Studios, Maastricht, NL / The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL, USA / EXPO Chicago, Chicago IL, USA / Contemporary Art Brussels, Brussels, BE.
Their work has been funded by:
the National Endowment for the Arts (USA) / the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts / the Oregon Arts Commission / the Museum of Contemporary Photography / the Ford Family Foundation.