DANAE’s Art Reviews: Selection of Recent Exhibitions to Experience Online
This year has so far been a moment of extreme cultural proliferation online and we witness, now more than ever, the birth of new forms of aesthetic experience. Art gains its virtual consistency, and cultural institutions, museums, art workers become of crucial importance in the construction of a new, conscious, network culture. Take a peek at our selection and prepare for a new and playful way to experience art!
CTM Cyberia
This year’s CTM Festival is a very special edition. The festival, curated by James Grabsch, Jan Rohlf, Oliver Baurhenn, Remco Schuurbiers, takes the form of a multiplayer environment in which participants are immersed in a mystical and stimulating landscape called “Transformation”. The participant dives into the 3D environment, skillfully designed by Lucas Gutierrez, and is invited to explore the space and unearth the artworks amidst the disorienting environment of mercurial visuals and erratic sounds. In “Transformation”, visual and sound art embody new practices, models and worlds, challenging the rigidity of current socio-cultural canons. The artists presented at CTM Cyberia offer the visitor a universe of hypnotic atmospheres and rich details. “Transformation” exploits all the possibilities of the virtual and makes us lose ourselves in sinuous textures, characters and surreal spaces. The sound, designed by Elvin Brandhi shapes the experience of the viewer by mediating between the user and his avatar, between the virtual and the physical, the inorganic and the organic. The CTM Festival proposes several ways of fruition of its contents, depending on the technical availability of its visitor and the specificity of the artwork presented. CTM 2021 presents the works of artists and artistic collectives including Mouse on Mars & Louis Chude-Sokei, Khyam Allami x Counterpoint, IOR50 x Club Qu, Sote & Tarik Barri, Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (S4NTP), Alba G. Corral, Byrke Lou, Robert Lippok & Lucas Gutierrez, Gabber Modus Operandi x Rimbawan Gerilya x Siko Setyano, Florence To, Omsk Social Club x Cashmere Radio x Alexander Iezzi, Peaches & Pussykrew, Lucas Gutierrez & Robert Lippok, Marcin Pietruszewski & Alex Freiheit, ans SFX.
When ? From 13 February to 14 March 2021.
Where ? Online at https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2021/cyberia
New Talismans
Founded in 2013 by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robertson, The Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA) is one of the pioneering institutions in the preservation and exhibition of digital art through virtual reality experiences. Committed to today’s digital avant-garde, DiMoDA featured three VR exhibitions downloadable through the museum’s website. Their last exhibition (DiMoDA 3.0), entitled New Talisman, explores the experience and embodiment of computer witchcraft in the post-internet age. New Talisman offers an immersive experience that orchestrates surreal landscapes and mystical atmospheres, which resonate in the music of ARIADNE. In the virtual, the visitor is captured in a new dimension and the works masterfully distributed in space are the new talisman. New Talisman presents the works of Morehshin Allahyari, Paul Hertz, Rindon Johnson, Shane Mecklenburger, Vicki Dang in the VR architecture designed by Debbie Ding. DiMoDA’s fourth proposed exhibition is scheduled for 2021 (TBA), and will be curated by Christiane Paul (Associate Prof. and Associate Dean at the School of Media Studies, The New School, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art). DiMoDA 4.0 “ Dis/location “ will feature works by Tamiko Thiel, LaJune McMillan, Banz&Bowinkle and Ricardo Miranda Zuniga.
When ? Current exhibition.
Where ? You can download the exhibition at https://dimoda.art/current-exhibition
We=Link: Sideways
We=Link: Sideways presents some heterogeneous network-based artworks tracing the history of art in the internet and vice versa. The net is the focal point of the exhibition, and corresponds to the meeting point between aesthetic experiments and critical positions towards the internet as a tool for the production of meanings. The exhibition presents some examples of net art from the 90s to the present day. Is net art heading towards a dead end or does it correspond to a turning point for digital art? According to the narrative proposed by We=Link: Sideways, net art is not only the last of the great avant-gardes of the 20th century but also the starting point for new perspectives of experimentation and interconnection between art and technology. We=Link: Sideways celebrates the wedding of art and internet culture, it celebrates artistic legitimacy in the critique of the net as an institutional, commercial and political space, it celebrates the germination and flowering of a recent, intrepid and counter-cultural artistic tradition. In this sense Zhang Ga, curator of the exhibition, proposes the analogy of the ‘sideway’: online artistic links build a parallel and non-centralized history, therefore rich and inspiring. The exhibition features twenty-two works by twenty-eight artists and artist collectives, including Mike Bennett, Wafaa Bilal, CHEN Pengpeng, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Matthieu Cherubini, Paolo Cirio, Leon Eckert, Ursula Endlicher, exonemo, Hervé Graumann, GUO Cheng, Vytas Jankauskas, Knowbotic Research, LAN, LIANG Yuhong, LIU Xing, Jonas Lund, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kyle McDonald, Haroon Mirza, Everest Pipkin, Cornelia Sollfrank, Wolfgang Staehle, Ubermorgen, Maciej Wisniewski, XU Haomin, ZHAO Hua and ZHOU Peng’an. We=Link: Sideways is presented by Chronus Art Center (CAC) in collaboration with CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), Ars at CERN (Geneva), Elektra (Montreal), Leonardo/ISAST, Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen), Light Art Space (Berlin), and The Whitney Museum of American Art’s artport (New York).
When ? From 21 November 2020 to 23 May 2021.
Where ? Online at http://we-link.chronusartcenter.org/
World on a Wire
Hyundai Motor Company and Rhizome of the New Museum present World on a Wire, a new group exhibition premiering on January 28, 2021, simultaneously at the Hyundai Motorstudio in Beijing and online. Oriented towards the exploration of the possibilities and poetics of computational simulation, the exhibition presents works related to emerging born-digital technologies, from augmented reality (AR), to virtual reality (VR), to artificial intelligence (AI). The website and gallery exhibition feature 11 works, of which 7 are commissions, by global artists. World on a Wire is curated by Rhizome’s artistic director Michael Connor with Baoyang Chen (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing) and Taiyun Kim (Hyundai Motor Company). The exhibition website, designed by Yehwan Song, is itself a work of interactive generative design that rearranges itself in unexpected ways depending on the user’s navigation. Paradoxically anti-user friendly, the exhibition website offers a playful and surprising way to discover the works, elusive by design. The exhibition presents works by Mariia Fedorova, LU Fei & LEI Jianhao, JooYoung Oh, Sascha Pohflepp (1978–2019), Matthew, Lutz, and Alessia Nigretti, Pete Jiadong Qiang, Tabor Robak, Rachel Rossin, Timur Si-Qin, Theo, Triantafyllidis, YE Nan, and ZZYW (Zhenzhen Qi & Yang Wang).
When ? From 28 January 2021.
Where ? Online at https://worldonawire.net/ and physically at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (January 28 — April 5, 2021); Hyundai Motorstudio Moscow (April 1 — July 4, 2021); Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul (May 7 — August 8, 2021)
not in, of, along, or relating to a line
The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery presents not in, of, along, or relating to a line, a collective exhibition showcasing nine artists engaged in the exploration of technology as a way to both escape and resist the physical restrictions we are globally experiencing. Technology becomes the center of collective and intimate history, and artists investigate it as a tool for creating playful narratives and deconstruct it as a system of power relations. Designed for mobile phones and curated by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Maya Allison, the exhibition allows its visitor to freely move from an artwork to another, building new lines and infinite possible paths. not in, of, along, or relating to a line explores a new way of experiencing digitally-born artworks in a unique virtual setting, and using an innovative curatorial approach. NYUAD Art Gallery disassociates itself from the frequent contemporary approach to curating, in which the gallery space is recast in the virtual. In the exhibition, the virtual takes on a space of its own completely unrelated to the physical exhibition space, offering another mode of experience linked to a more intimate dimension of the visitor and the work via smartphone. The smartphone itself becomes an extension towards the virtual, and the visitor holds the exhibition in his hands. The exhibition not in, of, along, or relating to a line guides us on a path of analysis and self-analysis with respect to the technological devices that pervade our daily lives, and it does so through the works of Addie Wagenknecht, Cao Fei, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lee Blalock, Maryam Al Hamra, Micha Cárdenas, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, Sophia Al-Maria, and Zach Blas.
When? From 20 January 2021.
Where? Online at https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/our-exhibitions/main-gallery/not-a-line/
Farniente, Matisse and I
Investigating the frontiers between traditional painting and new media, Alexandra Gorczynski presents her second solo exhibition at Danae, titled Farniente, Matisse and I. Curated by Laetitia Maffei and Margaux Sanz, the exhibition borrows the canons of gaming by creating a virtual landscape in which the visitor can navigate and get lost. Ancient and modern atmospheres frame Gorczynski’s works and offer an experience that is both meditative and interactive. Static and movement coexist in the exploration and playful experience of Farniente, Matisse and I, and offer new perspectives on artistic materiality and the perception of the real and hyperreal. The exhibition platform offers the visitor to dive into a universe with an ancient and classical flavor that meets the compositional grace of the artist’s works. Danae offers an HD experience by downloading the exhibition directly to your PC or a version accessible through your web browser. Both experiences reveal the interactive and immersive dimension of the artistic display, and allow an absolutely personal and unique way to discover the artworks. Gorczynski’s works investigate the perception of the body outside and inside the virtual, questioning the concept of femininity with a brilliantly contemporary gaze. In Farniente, Matisse and I we can admire Emerald Obelisk (2015), Honey Water (2016), After Dark (2014), Illuminated Crescent (2015), Static Stream (2014), Vanity Theater (2016), Wild Eclectus (2017), Crystal with Pastels (2016), Languor in the Flowers (2016), and Paradise (2016).
When? From February 26 2021.
Where? Online at DANAE.IO
