Aporia Series #2, 2012

Showing the artists in politicized clown costumes (Aziz wears a military uniform, while Cucher has a Star of David on his tie) as they walk through their industrial Queens neighborhood, this photo alludes to the iconic centerpiece of their 2012 Indianapolis Museum of Art survey, Some People. An evocative and highly collectable artwork, the piece is deeply tied into Aziz + Cucher's innovative artistic practice, and represents the first time the artists' have featured themselves in their work.

Working together since they met at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s, Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher have been making critically acclaimed multimedia artworks that investigate what it means to be alive at a time rife with the possibilities of the human genome project and the opening up of world borders. Their art is preoccupied by notions of the reconfigurability of the self, a strange new malleability that they often take to sci-fi extremes.

Hailing from multicultural backgrounds with roots in the Middle East—Aziz is Lebanese; Cucher's family live in Israel—the pair have fully embraced the merger of the collaborative process, communicating with a single email and making all of their art together. (In 1995, when Cucher was invited to represent Venezuela in the 46th Venice Biennale, he had to lobby to involve Aziz as his partner.) Sometimes their interest in remaking the human experience leads them to the grotesque, such as their 1994-5 Dystopia series featuring portraits of men and women with their features digitally excised, or their 1999-2000 series Interiors, which presented domestic architectural details and furnishings covered in what appears to be freckled skin.

In 2012, the artists opened an ambitious survey of new work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, titled Some People. A series of immersive video installations, the show—marking the 20th year of the duo's collaboration—presented an overview of the artists' multipronged approach to their work, and featured their own likenesses (dressed in politicized clown costumes) for the first time. According to the artists, "We have never included ourselves directly in our work, but having waited this long to do it has perhaps given us the freedom to look at ourselves with more humor and not to take ourselves so seriously, throwing caution to the wind."

Aziz + Cucher have also been featured in major solo exhibitions at the Herzyliya Museum of Art in Israel (2002) and the Reina Sofia in Madrid (1999), as well as group shows at SFMOMA (2011), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei (2007), and the New Museum (2002).

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