Nikita 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 at 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; Cubitt, London; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and in Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. 

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. Gale is a Contributing Editor at Triple Canopy and a former board member of GREX. 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 Salmon Creek Farm’s Community Council.