Swinging and almost reaching it. Swinging and ceasing to exist.

From the corners of the mouth to the corners of the eyes.

The exhibition you’re looking at today begins with a sound that drowns out some letters. The day started with Mar telling me that her grandfather used to say to her that the belly laughs when you are on a swing and your stomach turns upside down. Belly laugh is what happens at a threshold situation, at the moment when your insides are shaken and bang up against each other. In the empty gap created just above the stomach when your insides are being turned. This swinging up-an-down motion draws a smile-like path. It never settles in the one position but breaks out in voluble, vivacious laughter and takes pleasure in expanding outside itself, far away from any centre. Where control is lost and instability reinstated.

Now draw a segment that can become shorter or longer. Do it more or less as follows:

Hold on tightly with your hands at shoulder height and give yourself a push backwards with all your weight. Your rigid torso will keep you steady. Your hands will become one with the chains. Push forward. Swing your legs forwards and backwards without losing sight of your torso. The more you clinch your abdominals the greater the impulse you will get. When you are on the way up your belly laughs. Repeat the movement over and over again but stop just at the moment when your gut tells you that you are about to go right over the top of the swing. You almost do it. Wait until the swinging momentum slows down and jump off without losing your balance. You will wobble a bit as you try to walk.

This is the same sequence of movement for walking through the space. You hold on tight to the sticky thread running through it: a chain of meanings that begins with the action and continues by means of objects, texts and images. An organ whose covering tissue is silvery, sonorous and with text-like incisions that regulate the score. The sequentially displayed pieces of tinfoil contain the text and part of the sound of the action, which keeps it flexible, malleable and easily bruised. Like a punishment when you have to write something one hundred times until you learn it. And it is on this skin where Mar etches what would seem to be the rules of an action that you still haven’t seen but which you can hear in the background.

You can hear a voice and the text now becomes sound. Outside the smile there is a sound fiction that seems to be anchored in a present time that keeps bumping into the past. They are the voices of an oral memory that tries to recall the history of an experience of collusion, riven through by all kinds of violence. It is Mar’s voice giving instructions to her siblings while they try to re-enact what seem to be oral games.

The action is revealed when you circle the big aluminium structure, a curved segment that operates like a retainer. The shape is a symbolic experience whose tension is impossible to repeat in a body. The interior is a gum that holds the video display which up until now had been skewed over the course of the walkthrough and is now rebuilt. The screens show materials which are edited, mixing images of an affective repertoire which sometimes return in time-lapse to the place of memory, eviscerating it like entrails. These images overlap with those of her siblings repeating the games you could hear before in the background. The structure turns out to be victims laughing acquiescently about their own oppression at moments when Mar’s siblings laugh and troll the music score. Whoever laughs first loses. Every time they laugh they destroy any chance of acceptance in the loss of one’s own space to that of regulated space. Their laughter reinstates instability, finds a foothold when language dries up, and it constantly disrupts the focused experience of what the action should be.

The device ends here and starts all over again in the references, dialogues and crosstalk. In the laughter, in the contraction and relaxation of muscles, in the dysmorphophobia of bodies when they are reflected in the large aluminium piece, in the structure that looms, that fills the space, that opens and closes at the folds of its corners. In a system that rises upwards, covers, recovers, discovers, stretches, contracts and lends a soft glow to the bodies that return to it. Here it begins again.

Mar Reykjavik studied Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, specialising in moving image, installation and action. She has a Master in MasterLav ‘Laboratory of contemporary audiovisual creation’ combined with the Residence for Artists of the Hidden Space, until 2018. In 2018 she is an artist in-residence at the Fundación Bilbaoarte where she develops her project WAAITT, until 2019, with which she obtains one of their awards. In 2019 she is one of the artists awarded a grant by the GVA Consorci de Museus de la Comunidad Valenciana to carry out a project within the framework of Resistències. She is in one of the residencies ‘Artists in Residence at La Casa Encendida + CA2M’. she carries out the RENDER project, together with Quiela Nuc and Jara Rocha, within the framework of the InJuve grant. Her work has been exhibited/screened in spaces nationwide such as Galería Rosa Santos, Pols, La Gallera, Fundació La Posta, Octubre CCC and el Muvim in Valencia, CA2M, Espacio Oculto, Storm And Drunk, Casabanchel or Cineteca de Matadero in Madrid, Zumzeig Cinema in Barcelona, Fundación Bilbaoarte or El Respiradero in the Basque Country, Da2 Artium Salamanca, COAC-Fotonoviembre in Tenerife and international ones such as Galeria NGBK, Berlin or SupermarketArtFair, Stockholm or Centro Cultural el Recoleta, in Buenos Aires.

La risa de la barriga (Belly Laugh)

La risa de la barriga

The exhibition HEAVVEN at Exgirlfriend Berlin incorporates a video installation which is part of Borrás’ new body of work - the ADAPTASI CYCLE, that has been developed over the course of the last five years. 

The work has been presented, along with a performance entitled RAAIN, specially designed for the opening night of the artist’s solo-exhibition:

RAAIN is a multi-dimensional spatial installation, featuring video, a live performer, sound, and other key elements of Borrás’ visual world and marked the show’s inauguration as a unique happening, forecasting the exhibition's conceptual realms.

Although connection is primarily identified with connectivity in modern western society, through an increasing amount of digitalization in almost every aspect of our lives, the concept of connection can of course be met in many diverse dimensions and contexts beyond the solely technology-based realm.

Borrás’ new work complex encompasses the ADAPTASI CYCLE, which is a divination of our reality, transcending the limits of pasts and futures, the organic and synthetic, the natural and technological. His work seeks to explore the metaphysical depths of adaptation as a method of surpassing the categorial limits of existence. The various elements of the exhibition operate as an essayistic portrait that embodies an augmented state of awareness of these aspects, and an elevated sense of connectivity.

Borrás’ previous works raise questions of how technology, and specifically lifestyle products can serve as performance-enhancers geared towards accelerating cerebral evolution. At the same time, technology can also become a diversion – it can provide the prospect of escape from the dismal reality of the inescapable decomposition inherent in nature. His new center of focus is based on the interconnectivity between nature and technology and the philosophical concept of adaptation. Borrás’ recent works address questions of transience and empathy within a technology-driven culture, adapting the principle that technology is both the translator and final application of science or, more generally, of knowledge. This conviction also becomes an impulse to explore various scenarios of future life because of its alignment with its meta-/physical disposition within the artist’s current approach.

Borrás creates a universe that invokes the ancient and the futuristic simultaneously. This universe is inhabited by the video work’s protagonist. With no one but a robotic dog for company, M (Ray La’Vord) lives in isolation in a soft cave, where he performs methodical and ceremonial acts. Seemingly completely at peace within its being and time, M creates captivating sense of suspense through his graceful, yet precise ritualistic exercises, as well as through his non-hierarchical approach to his world. Treating his body, surrounding objects, and space with both connected and caring respectfulness, Borrás subtly visualizes a bigger metaphysical context in this amor vacui.

The ‘soft-cave’ seems sterile, but is a depiction of the womb as a safe space of infinite harmony – a space not only protected from exterior chaos, but that even doubts the existence of any kind of chaos at all. The space, like its inhabitant, conveys a sense of other-worldly, idiosyncratic beauty, foreseen in the lifestyle tendencies of Zeitgeist, but that exists without any of the capitalistic drama and stylistic ‘tricks’ or ‘gimmicks’ of our all- and self-promoting, illusionary world.

The distinct and consequent aesthetic determination of Borrás’ work might seem intimidatingly cathartic at times, but in actuality, it stems from a vision and pure desire for serenity, clarity, and innocence within his post-human/transitory realm. 

Mit Borrás is a visual artist based in both Madrid and Berlin. His multi-dimensional artistic approach primarily incorporates video- and sculpture-based works that conceptually explore how modern society has elevated digitalism, technology, and progress into its paradigm of evolution. 

Mit Borrás. Heavven, Adaptasi Cycle exhibition. Film and installation views at Exgirlfriend Gallery, Berlin 2021. Works by Mit Borrás, Art Director Rachel Lamot, Music Daniel Vacas Peralta. With Ray La’Vord, A1 Robot. Yoga Sonja Sims, Production Design Cavve Pavilion, Robotics, Casual Robots, Prosthetics Ayudame 3D, The Cave H. Puerta de América, Make Up Harpo, Eloy Noguera Atienza, A1 Robot design Canbot, Drone Karacho Berlin. With the support of Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn Neustart Kultur. Images courtesy of the artist, 2021.

A catalogue of the exhibition will be published by Exgirlfriend Berlin.

Mit Borrás

HEAVVEN

The title of the exhibition refers to the widespread idea that mental distress is a personal problem - a condition for which only the individual is responsible. The artists Sophie Hoyle and Barbora Kleinhamplová continuously deconstruct this notion and shed light on collective and political aspects of anxiety, illness and trauma.

As we live in a society where mental health problems and sickness have been privatised, internalised self-blame is a natural reaction. Privatization of these conditions creates an easy path to pathology. 

 communicates that these experiences are perhaps not pathological but a proportionate reaction. Capitalism has laced our all spectrum of social and private life with anxiety. In this machine, we loop, we circulate. We are on display. Non-consensually choosing between fight or flight. We seek remedies, yet the widely-used ones don’t work for us. 

The installation sets the works of Barbora Kleinhamplová and Sophie Hoyle into a dialogue and creates an incubator to portray our complex human experience. Their multimedia works are characterised by profound research that also builds on personal experiences. Therapeutic practices in companies portraying a laughing yoga session, pressure to perform and life in the precariat, which is critically examined in Kleinhamplová’s work, are linked to Hoyle’s work on the anxiety and trauma of living in complex systems of oppression. 

The multimedia installation combines video works, writing and objects to create a repeating cycle of anxieties, neuro acoustic stimuli, curving, moving or overloaded bodies. In the vertigo of this vortex, which gives one the feeling of the motion of a machine that can hardly be interrupted, we want to speak to you: It’s Not Your Fault.

Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer based in London. Her practice explores an intersectional approach to post-colonial, queer, feminist, critical psychiatry and disability issues and looks at the relation of the personal to (and as) political, individual and collective anxieties. and how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalization intersect. She relates personal experiences of being queer, non-binary and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. From lived experience of psychiatric conditions and trauma, or PTSD, they began to explore the history of biomedical technologies rooted in state and military surveillance and control.

Her work was presented as part of Transmediale ‘For Refusal’ (2021) with APV Collective, Werkleitz Festival 2021, Psychic Refuge (online project with Forma and Unlimited, 2021), and Science Gallery London (2019).

Barbora Kleinhamplová is an artist living and working in Prague. Her work is rooted in the relationship of human existence and contemporary political and economical institutions. The script of her works derives from the existing format of group interaction, the performative dimension of her projects accents the symbolic role of body politics in current systems of power. Barbora Kleinhamplová is a co-founder of the artist institution Institute of Anxiety. She received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2015) and her work has been exhibited at Futura Gallery Prague (2021), Drdova Gallery Prague (2019), Savvy Contemporary Berlin (2018) Jakarta Biennale (2017), 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York (2016), New Museum, New York (2014), or Astrup Farnley Museet, Oslo (2014).

Sophie Hoyle

Barbora Kleinhemplová

It's Not Your Fault

When music group Kraftwerk needed a video to match its electronic music in back in 1984, they turned to American researcher and artist Rebecca Allen, a pioneer in the field of computer art. Allen is the creative genius of Kraftwerk’s 1986’s 

, one of the earliest examples of rendered 3D graphics in a music video.

 Creating the milestone video, which made Allen a major force behind the German band’s visual aesthetic in the 1980s, was a painstaking process that took nearly two years for Allen and her team at the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Laboratory to complete.

In the abstract video, animated heads representing the faces of the group members flash across the screen. This work involved the development of state-of-the-art facial animation software in order to bring the virtual mannequins to life. Allen wanted to create a “visual digital aesthetic” that would capture the personalities of Kraftwerk members and essence of their image, and would complement their digital sound with a new form of art making using computers. Nowadays it might be pretty easy to digitize a 3D object, but at the time it was a very complex, crafted process. Allen would have to put little pieces of tape over the models and put it in a reference cube, to then digitize it point by point. It took hundreds of hours just to get the colors exactly the way Allen wanted them.

”There’s so much involved – not just the color, but then you had to get the lighting … and it’s on some crummy TV, ultimately,” Allen said in an interview. “But that’s the way I am. If you’re an animator, it’s already clear that you’re a fanatic – an obsessive. Anybody who wants to make frames for every second of movement is obviously pretty obsessive about things.”

 music video still looks prescient, even today and has not only shaped Kraftwerk’s iconic aesthetic, but also created a new visual approach equally in fine arts and pop-culture.

In 1982, Allen had already worked with choreographer Twyla Tharp on 

, a feature length dance film with music by David Byrne, in which a computer generated character plays the role of St. Catherine. It was produced by the BBC and was the first time the public had seen a 3D human model moving on TV. This model was also the world’s first 3D computer model of a woman’s body. It was created in 1972 by Ed Catmull (founder of the now world-reknown animation studio Pixar) but it wasn’t until 1981 when Allen started working with it and decided to try to get it to move that it started to come alive really.

In an extended interview from 2020 with Arts Technologies Curator at Serpentine Galleries Kay Watson, Allen explains the background of her career as both a researcher and an artist working with and challenging early computer and advanced technology. Allen’s approach of artistic expression through computer based technology and her vision of 3D animation as an artistic tool are deeply inspiring and seminally influential for animating technologies until this day.

“Artists are inventors too; coming up with new ideas and new forms of expression, so to be in a research lab and to be an artist inventing new things made a lot of sense to me.”

The full interview with Allen and Watson is linked below.

Interview with Kay Watson

Rebecca Allen

Musique Non Stop

35-mm film (digitized), color, sound, 84:54 min

 from 1997, Lynn Hershman Leeson creates a cinematic memorial dedicated to the historical figure Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron. The Duchess, better known as Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), was a British mathematician a century ahead of her time, who wrote the first algorithm for the Analytical Engine – a mechanical calculating machine designed by Charles Babbage – and thus laid the foundation for the concept of programming language. Therefore, she is today considered the originator of the first ever computer program, one hundred years before computers were even invented.

In Hershman Leeson’s film, Ada Lovelace’s story is channeled through Emmy, played by Francesca Faridan – a contemporary computer scientist researching artificial life. By using her own DNA genetic code, Emmy collapses time and is able to communicate directly with Ada, embodied by Tilda Swinton. Realizing how parallel their lives are, the protagonist embarks on the task of “saving” Ada and plans to bring her role model back to life through genetic engineering. In the process, the borders between past and present, virtual and real, blur and Ada and Emmy both recognize the implications their place in time.

 is the first film ever to use a virtual set. By digitizing and manipulating still photographs taken in various Victorian inns in the San Francisco Bay Area and then using them as the film’s “sets.” Actors performed against blue screens, and the whole movie was shot in six days, with backgrounds added during production.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Science-Fiction film is a deep dive on feminist technological ideas, innovative visual technique and a compelling, female-centred story from the 1990s and back to the 19th century. The historic figure of Countess of Lovelace, is portrayed as a visionary pioneer in the film, whose ideas are put in check by social circumstances and rigid role models.  Hershman Leeson addresses the discrimination of women and their marginalization in the sciences. At the same time, she creates a tribute to a historically significant woman and honors her in the form of this science fiction film.

Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. She has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, artificial intelligence, bio art, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.

Lynn Hershmann Leeson

Fembio Ada Lovelace

Conceiving Ada

At the beginning of the 20th century HELLERAU was founded as a joint project of industry, research, and art and as a response to industrialization and changes in working and living conditions. More than 100 years later, 

, a new international platform, a laboratory, an experimental and discursive space for the arts in the digital age in the wake of critical phases of global transformation processes, is being established at HELLERAU.


, a joint festival will be presented for the first time in cooperation with MUTEK: HYBRID – CUTTING EDGE CANADA. Originally this collaboration was set to take place in 2020. Due to the current state of the world this event can only take place in 2021 and almost exclusively online: 

For four days, from March 11 to 14, we will present performances on virtual stages, an interactive virtual gallery exhibiting innovative digital artworks, an auditorium showcasing talks and panels, and a listening room with a non-stop selection from the archives of the MUTEK network

In addition, in cooperation with PYLON, HYBRID<>BOX, a modular container gallery, will open in front of the Main Hall of HELLERAU, Dresden, which will showcase a variety of digital artworks throughout this year.

The focus of HYBRID – CUTTING EDGE CANADA is on artists who live in Canada, have worked there or are active in the MUTEK network. Beyond the performative program we will further present talks and panels of the NEW NATURE initiative in collaboration with the Goethe Institut Montreal: A project in which climate scientists, technology experts and artists respond to the need to rethink our relationship with nature. With the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada, we hope to provide a great platform for all artists and an exciting experience for our audience. An experience that will bring like-minded people closer together – no matter where in the world.

The festival platform on virtual.mutek.org will be open between Thursday, March 11 and Sunday, March 14, 2021. The live program will be streamed each night from 20:00 German time (CET = GMT+1) with an additional replay scheduled for 20:00 Montreal time (EST = GMT-5). The virtual gallery, the auditorium, and the listening room will be available on-demand throughout the entire festival period.

After your free registration you will be granted access to the full virtual festival experience of HYBRID – CUTTING EDGE CANADA. Tickets are free – but with a donation you can help us support LISA, the network of the club scene in Saxony.

HYBRID

MUTEK Festival Platform

HYBRID Festival Podcast

HYBRID - Cutting Edge Canada

Zona Cero, Cenotafio Digital (Ground Zero, Digital Cenotaph)

 is an immersive and interactive installation by Yosi Negrín that projects the construction of an architecture facilitating the search and commemoration of the digital death of the image and the landscape. 

Where does the image die? Where do images go when they are forgotten? How much physical space does the digital image occupy?The construction of this 

 arises from the idea of commemorating the disappearance of virtual images, which are left behind, buried and forgotten in the e-archive. With this monument of death or digital cenotaph, the absence of the digital image is commemorated and honored. An absence generated by its own overproduction and abundance. A “cenotaph” is a symbolic architectural typology erected in honor of illustrious deceased, whose corpses are too far away to be buried or have been altogether lost. The word “cenotaph” derives from the Greek kenos, whose meaning is “empty”, and taphos, which means “grave”. Here the dead bodies become those images of landscapes that have been dematerialized on the internet and which have been physically stored in deserts or glaciers, under robotized, dark and refrigerated architectures.

The main structure of “Zona Cero” consists of a large postnatural sphere that rests on a scrapped car. Named as “chromatrope”, this architecture captures every subject that walks through the cenotaph, as an interactive panopticon that follows the visual morphology of a GoogleStreetView Car. During the exhibition, all these bodies and shadows are registered by this panopticon recorder, building collectively a moving image of reinterpreted abandoned landscapes. The bodies of the visitors become, then, stored as visual souls on the walls of this post-industrial building. Furthermore, the other main installation piece is a drone panoramic video projection which represents a journey through the human-shaped and eroded geologies of the Canary Islands, from stony and volcanic quarries to tanks or water reservoirs.

 Here, it appears in a post-apocalyptic landscape as an abandoned and dismembered figure. This symbol manifests the fundamental role of the individual vehicle as the creator of the collective territory. In a sense, Google StreetView has become the panopticon of the 21st century: since, thanks, precisely, to this infamous vehicle we can create the very images of the spaces where it moves through. Moreover, the exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation created by local artist Pedro D. Sáiz, which mixes ambient and glitchy records of abandoned industries, emphasizing the already unstable atmosphere of the whole installation. Adding another layer to the immersive character of the show, during the opening day three foreign and disoriented souls walked around the installation as bodies that were lost. Likewise, the exhibition is also broadcast via the artist’s Twitch (linked below), so the audience can follow the development of the immersive multi-channel video onto their own screens at home.

, dead and alive natures coexist with machineries, automobiles, screens, farming waste and artificially produced images, recreating the ruins of our future. By mixing these funerary and mythological architectures, the space of 

 becomes an interactive and immersive cemetery. One where devastating feelings come to us after being witnesses of this abandoned landscape from the future, of this digital and physical archive of death. This landscape of death is built through both naturalistic and technological elements, which resemble our future post apocalyptic ruins. 

 expands above the digital, for its images occupying space in the cloud. On one hand, this impact of the digital in the physical world becomes evident in the technological yet material skeletons spread across the exhibition: computers, keyboards, PC’s towers. On the other hand, the material presence on the e-archive is realized on the screen projection, since all images of physically-altered territories become part of the cloud.

 the idea of “cenotaph” opens a direct dialogue with the building that back in time was a crude oil refining deposit. Indeed, “El Tanque” is a trace of the industrial historical heritage of the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a surviving and reconverted skeleton of what was a striated and degraded panorama of the Canary coast. This scenographic installation offers the possibility of re-thinking the relationship between spaces currently dedicated to art and the memories we keep from our past. As well as our relation with the elements we choose (consciously or unconsciously) to keep for the near future, whether digital or physical. The museum, the place which in our desire to collect we consecrate to memory, has become a graveyard of accumulation. The pieces from the past are small gestures already dead that are preserved in the hope of obtaining a memory of what we thought was in the future.

Yosi Negrín (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1994) is an artist, architect, curator and editor based in Madrid whose works revolve around the territory and its digital presence, raising questions about the relation between technological objects and how they modify human lives. More specifically, his pieces focus on the study of both the physical and the digital map, and on the meta-narratives created by them which, at the end, build our reality. Informed by his architectural vision of art, Negrín works across moving images, 3D representations, found objects and post-produced images (made and found) to create a series of installations that highlight the constructed nature of our relation to (and perception of) spaces. Currently he is interested in exploring how technology shapes not only our vision of reality in the present, but also what we believe possible in the future.

Yosi Negrín

Twitch

Zona Cero, Cenotafio Digital

You are going to take a bath in good luck.

, multi-media artists Tatjana Vall and Justin Urbach encounter transhuman realities with an equally artificial and vulnerable physicality.

Starting from the trend towards self-optimization of the human body in Western society, the artists develop a narrative centered on a sunbed in order to expose questionable values of an outdated consumer behavior.

„The change of values over the past few decades has shown, that the interests of the first world forward-thinking population is shifted towards the ‚nonmaterial‘ and ‚original’. Following this, transhumanistic tendencies that could become more relevant and real in near future could be a sort of isolation due to self optimization, driven by the curiosity to overcome biological and physical barriers.“ Vall explains.

The joint project is a hybrid of a physical exhibition taking place at Digital Art Space in Munich and its digital extension online at the space’s website and the artists’ instagram channels. The physical exhibition on site at the Digital Art Space is composed of an actual open sunbed, flooding the exhibition space with cold blue light, a printout version of the UV map of Tatjana Vall’s animated goat in with textures and three screens presenting each artist’s video works. The works project artifactual components of the theme: Abstract motion sequences, surreal scenes and trans medial translations expand the retro-technofetishist view, crossing it with current transhumanistic currents. Both artists respond to each other in positions that are brought together in a two-channel video which have been available exclusively on view on the art space’s website. 

The artists constantly expand the exhibition through short videos and animations on their instagram accounts, that are also linked below. 

You are going to take a bath in good luck. 

as a positive affirmation is only one part of Vall’s and Urbach’s titles for the multi-layered project: „Because of the broadness and layered exhibition platforms, we don’t use only this one title. The social media videos are all ’subtitled’ with different fortune cookie quotes. The inspiration for it came because of the odd formulation. For us, this had a soft and relaxing effect somehow. This mood should reflect the solarium light, which is equally strange: neither cold nor warm but very relaxing.“ as Vall clarifies.

Vall and Urbach both study at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and have collaborated before: Their trans media performance 

, which also has been a hybrid of on- and offline presentation, took place in October 2020. The performance with six actors dealt with the expectations of our current first world society and its self reflection and translated the the poem 

C’mon pigs of western civilizations Eat more grease

 by Allen Ginsberg from the late 1990s into contemporary context.

„Apart from creating art, new media reflects our expectations and behavior towards the objects and surfaces we interact with.“ Vall explains her approach to new media, continuing that „there will always be the necessity for a translator between new media itself and a human audience.“.

Tatjana Vall

@tat.vall

Justin Urbach

@justin_urbach

 is the first solo online exhibition of digital artist Theo Triantafyllidis that was hosted by Meredith Rosen Gallery. 

An undisclosed location. Dry land under a scorching sun. Something abominable has happened here in recent memory. Now a ritual is taking place. The remains of what was once human are flickering in darkness. Nature is reclaiming what is hers. She is savage and unforgiving. She is laughing at us. Her sinister laughter echoes in the emptiness.  Ritual re-imagines the notion of site-specificity within the mediated landscape. The digital and physical work for this exhibition sit in a forgotten mining town somewhere in the California desert. 

The viewer was invited to interact with Triantafyllidis’ live simulation, sculptures and custom electronics blurring the line between the real life and online experience. The exhibition, which exists solely in the virtual sphere, had been live 24 hours a day for its duration, and is inaccessible thereafter.

The physical location of the works has transformed from desert, to iron mine, to prison, to film shoot location for hire, to apocalyptic concept art, to game engine demo, and to downloadable 3D environment. In each step of the transformation the artifacts of the process become inscribed as deep marks in the landscape. Triantafyllidis intervenes into this environment with a series of gestures that span all scales, from land-art to miniature sculpture, in order to propose an alternate reality.

Triantafyllidis’ most ambitious live simulation to date, Ritual, contains an ecosystem of new inhabitants, including a couple of mean hyenas, racing crows on Bird™ scooters and an ant colony. Triantafyllidis assigns each character its own primitive Artificial Intelligence and then places them to roam free and respond to the fabricated landscape sourced from a Game Engine demo. Like a mysterious ritual, sometimes humorous, other times ominous and ruthless, this ecosystem is continuously producing unexpected connections and results.

Similar to fragments from a mysterious narrative, Triantafyllidis’ new sculptural works are extending the world of Ritual, the live simulation, back into the physical location, pushing the boundaries between reality and fiction. The work Effigy, consists of a mix of 3D printed parts, motocross apparel, LA palm trees and zip ties. Conceptually built by crows from scavenged robot parts, this anthropomorphic effigy works both as a religious symbol and a deterrent for other bird clans. Like all of the works in the exhibition, this piece is an artifact from the animals in the live simulation. Another sculpture, 

, is a stand alone immersive experience and consists of a VR headset figuratively bitten by a hyena.  Inside the hollowed out headset are two miniature sculpted figures with custom lighting made for a solo viewing experience.

When Triantafylldis places the physical and digital work back into the desert for the online documentation, he is most interested in the disassociation of time.  Are the videos live or is this documentation of an apocalyptic past? The strange sense of place immerses the viewer in the location, unlike any other online viewing experience, through its time-based programming and field audio recording. A set of static cameras surveil this mysterious location and question the viewer’s position within the artist’s fictional reality. During the current situation of the pandemic and environmental concerns of global warming, we relate to this eerie apocalyptic world devoid of humans and take a peek at what life might be like on the other side.

Theo Triantafyllidis is an artist who builds virtual spaces and interfaces for the human body to inhabit them. He creates expansive worlds and complex systems where the virtual and the physical merge in uncanny, absurd and poetic ways. These are often manifested as performances, virtual and augmented reality experiences, games and interactive installations. He uses awkward interactions and precarious physics, to invite the audience to embody, engage with and challenge these other realities. Through the lens of monster theory, he investigates themes of isolation, sexuality, and violence in their visceral extremities. He offers computational humor and AI improvisation as a response to the tech industry’s agenda. He tries to give back to the online and gaming communities that he considers both the inspiration and one of the contexts for his work by remaining an active participant and contributor.

Theo Triantafyllidis (b. 1988, Athens, GR) holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. He has shown work in museums, including the Hammer Museum in LA and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, DE. He was part of Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale and the 2018 Athens Biennale: ANTI-.  His work was exhibited at the Rubell Family Collection in 2019 in Still Human. A mixed reality performance commissioned by the Onassis Foundation was presented at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020. Theo Triantafyllidis lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Meredith Rosen Gallery New York.

Theo Triantafyllidis

Ritual

The wind as a decisive spatial element in an exhibition in which the visitor can become aware of a silent force of nature that surrounds us almost constantly but is still almost invisible.


 (lat. path) by the Berlin-based artist collective Das Numen combines a locally well-defined indoor space with an ephemeral element resulting from a subtle inclusion of the outside world. Not all elements of the artwork can be perceived visually.  The aesthetically pleasing structure of the installation attracts the visitor as the first eye-catcher into the room. Recalling an abstract organ, the installation already promises a link beyond what is visible via its optical attributes. Six labial pipes and a tongue whistle are used to produce sounds that reach into the room; moving air currents fulfill the room and generate a Presence transcending the physical construction.

 The striking design of stainless steel bodies, rubber hoses and cables looks like a hybrid of engine and religious instrumental structure. With their air-indexed sounds, the pipes, which are between 4.20 and 4.80 meters long and horizontally suspended in the space, create a recreation of a natural force that ranges from silence to deafening lawns, or gentle caresses to brutal destruction.

These pipes do in fact not play a composed piece of music or reproduce an algorithmically generated sequence of tones, instead the tones are directly related to moving air (wind) – and are free of human intention. Twenty weather stations, collecting and processing weather data live at various locations, are used by Das Numen to monitor wind speeds, transfer them into the exhibition and translate them into stimuli using special software. The rushing of the wind passing trees, the majestic lawn of a storm, is now perceptible detached from its point of origin manifesting itself as a spatial experience. A duality of places in direct communication with each other creates a transcendent moment.

The impressive pipes are controlled by valves allowing previously compressed air to flow through the cavities, the air column inside begins to vibrate and at the labium or tongue to transform itself into an audible sound. In an organ-like construction, the energy flow of compressed air is called wind and refers directly to its natural relatives. Winds as an elusive entity become a sculptural force and the generated sounds a reference of space.

In his static, bound context, the visitor simultaneously experiences measurement data from places not only far away from himself, rather from various places on earth that occur simultaneously. This creates an aesthetic and philosophical experience of one’s own localization and relativity that extends beyond human dimensionality. The surrounding space becomes a resonant sphere of experience as well as the catalyst for sounds which only become perceptible through it.

Scientific data, which are recorded, processed and stored in indescribable quantities at any time, are also given a physical form and an acoustic expression with 

. There is an allegorical moment on the connections between climate and life. Atmosphere influences resonance space, resonance space influences sound, sound influences air. No air, no wind, no sound, no climate, and no life unless there is wind.  All of them are in cyclical processes and in direct connection.

The artists collaborate with specialists and scientists whose collaboration condenses the complex processes – often reminiscent of futuristic experiments -, into works of art that are alienated from their original content and placed in a context where they can be experienced and enable discourses far removed from scientific analysis.

 has been presented first in 2017 at Dittrich & Schlechtriem Gallery in Berlin.

Das Numen are Julian Charrière, Andreas Greiner, Markus Hoffmann and Felix Kiessling. The four artists work together both alone and temporarily as Das Numen. With their work, the collective connects issues of environment, society, nature and the correlative processes between them.

DAS NUMEN

Meatus

PLASMA 5 is finally out! 224 sharp looking pages full of science and the science fiction that inspired it! Bravo!

The latest issue of the infamous magazine recounts not just the exciting science that is being done from Berlin to LA, but also the incredible personalities behind it all. A testament to living and breathing the unimaginable. To making the impossible, possible. A thrilling journey through the work and minds of all kindred nerds, whether they be artists, scientists, or both. PLASMA 5 is the platform for creatives to speak the fierceness of their work and express the boldness of their personas.

The latest innovations in space exploration, science, and technology have launched us into a new age. One that has shifted our perception of the world through significant scientific breakthroughs and interplanetary discoveries. We now find ourselves living in a realm of knowledge hitherto unfathomed. A reality that almost sounds like science fiction and one where possibilities keep opening up. Exciting times for sure! 

Having spoken to many different scientists for this issue, PLASMA Magazine has noted time and time again the deep impact that science fiction has had on their research. From the engineers who built the largest space telescope to date (James Webb Space Telescope – JWST) to the biologists who study the strange properties of spider threads, science fiction has been one of the motivating factors that got them into their fields of study. But why? Because of our innate ability to put ourselves in scenarios where we live and breathe the unimaginable. To dream big no matter the odds. Science fiction is the potential of what we can build. What we can discover. It is a spark. For this, it is no wonder that we find it to be a key element of scientific discovery and technological development.

The new issue of PLASMA comes with 224 pages, jam-packed with interviews, stories, behind the scene sneak peaks, photo series, posters, and nerd guides that speak to this. Scientists from different fields, from Berlin to LA, all talking about their personal motivations and passions. A Berlin special introduces us to the diverse research areas this city is host to. Everything from the exploration of Mars to the creation of humanoid robots, Berlin is most certainly becoming a scientific point of reference in Europe. From there we jump across the Atlantic to explore all the latest nerd hot spots in NYC, learn about the latest JWST advancements, and so much more before our final jump over to the West Coast, where more scientific tales await!

The PLASMA Magazine’s team has yet again met and interviewed many people who have followed their vision and unusual ideas with a fearless determination to see them through, regardless of what others might think.

 „This, we know, is the only way. It’s not about ego, it’s about seeing the bigger picture and, in doing so, seeking kindred visionaries that will contribute to it. If there’s one thing we can learn from all these scientists, artists, and sci-fi characters, is that we are stronger as a team. No one achieves anything alone, not even Iron Man.“ 

 Diana Wehmeier (CEO + creative director of PLASMA Magazine)

Clemens Fantur, an editorial photographer from Vienna, has created the photographic concept for the issue. London-based Editor in Chief Judit Agui, specializing in science communication, and Co-Editor Azul Pinochet Barros, PhD Candidate at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), have both worked through the interviews and texts for the issue. Creative Director and PLASMA Founder, Diana Wehmeier, developed the nerdy creative concept seen from cover to cover. She also carried out most of the interviews and provided the raw content for the magazine. The design and artistic language of the entire edition was created by the avant-garde visions of Berlin-based designer and art director David Benski.

The 5th edition is available in 250 shops worldwide (London, NYC, LA, and more) and will also be available at PYLON-Lab. 

PLASMA Magazine

PLASMA Magazine #5

 is a video essay, which as a large-sized projection, forms center of the eponymous exhibition by New York based artists Eva Mattes and Franco Mattes (installation views from its presentation at 

 has been realised in collaboration with data analyst Vladan Joler, to whom the artists have voluntarily delivered all emails exchanged in the last 13 years (over 70,000 personal emails sent and received) and several months of browsing history.<br /> The video collects and analyzes the enormous wealth of information that often reveals intimate details of the private lives of the two artists, such as political or culinary preferences, work processes, places visited, or places where they lived, in order to create a portrait of them by extracting and examining those personal data and metadata. 

„This is the point of view from the Panopticon tower, where a centralized hub of information maintains records of our every move. Like the famous portal in Spike Jonze’s movie led to John Malkovich’s head, this video is a portal into our minds.“

Likewise, the work reflects how all of our data is constantly reviewed, extracted, organized and sold by social media, government agencies, banks and smartphone applications, with the aim of influencing our behavior, generating profit and political consensus.

 (2019), a large installation consisting of a network of cable trays that unfolds throughout the exhibition space. These usually invisible industrial infrastructures are visibly present here. Suspended from the ceiling, they descend to up to waist height, limiting the movements of visitors. Interacting with existing structures, they reflect the assimilation of the Internet into everyday life.

The installation becomes a reflection on the insoluble link between public and private life, on the concept of privacy, on the invisible traces that we unknowingly disseminate on the net every time we connect. Inside the cables circulate, in constant flow, dozens of private photos taken by the artists, hidden from the human eye. Invisible images, yet always present, thus contribute to the formulation of what Byung-Chul Han defines as “the society of digital surveillance, which has access to the collective unconscious”.

Eva and Franco Mattes (originally from Brescia, Italy) form a duo, also known as 0100101110101101.org, as which they have been collaborating since 1995. Their works are the result of a strong ability to understand and use new media. For more than 20 years they have constantly produced works that respond to and examine our hyper-connected condition of life, exposing – often with notions of black humor -, its deepest ethical and political implications.

Their work has been exhibited at SFMoMA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; 20th Biennale of Sydney; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Performa, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; New Museum, New York; Manifesta, Frankfurt and the Venice Biennale.

Eva Mattes + Franco Mattes

My Big Little Data @ Careof

What Has Been Seen @ Fondation Phi

My Little Big Data

Paaulo Arraiano presented his recent video work 

 as part of the eponymous solo-show which has been on view until September 4th 2019 at Milan-based art space 

The paradoxical act of creation comes from a place of restlessness. The body, the mind, and the spirit inhabiting the conflict of time and space. Paulo Arraiano’s work embodies some of the most uneasy questions of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

Through an ecological and minimal aesthetic, Arraiano shows a mediation between paradoxes, that at a first glance wouldn’t coexist. The artist’s clean and precise work shows an apparent peace and order, which hides the dichotomy of the savageness and what is highly polished. The choice of digital found imagery, captured with advanced technological tools (such as satellites and NASA devices), emerges as a base of the free access to information online. However, the lingering content of the images is nature, scaling from micro to macro. What is intrinsically human and how far can the technological humanity survive? Is there any degree of consciousness in the machine? The natural fluidity of life has been extensively explored by Paulo Arraiano, under the visual austerity of technological media. At this time the artist observes a shift on the paradigm of the emotional, sexual and spiritual human nature, which is being suppressed by a remote and mobile intellectualization. We are bound by the unknown eyes of God that records our digital life on a cloud. If on the one hand, our bodies are now remote mediators of control (monitored and also monitors), on the other, we are still made of the purest essence of the universe. On ​Sensorial Divinities,​ Arraiano explores exactly that – our existence and our source as water. Could it be that we are reaching a point of non-presence in which our hyperconnected life may soon depend on gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free, animal-free tube saline feeding? When thinking about the Anthropocene effects – extinction, possible humanity relocation to never before habitable areas of the world – one must wonder how does change affect the environment and how does the environment affect human essence.

The artist plays on the field between reality and the digital as a means to archive what once was and may not be, resulting in a dystopian view of post-humanism or trans-humanism. Moreover, Arraiano questions what is sensorial today and how are our senses activated, as we must assume that how we communicate has shifted into a visual paradigm, hence our connection to nature is being mediated by images. In ​Carbon Footprint Paulo Arraiano, shapes the flowy, almost etheric record of a spiritual machine, bird’s eye view, of bare land, which once was modeled by a life force. Fossilized memories of humanity are engulfed by sensory and watery appealing shapes, which may be containers of the aforementioned serum of life. The liquid is in a state of flow that feeds the shown ecosystem of possibilities.

The work that gives the title to this exhibition ​

,​ functions as an apparatus for a new spirituality. During five minutes images of nature and technology are merging, while a voice recites what unconsciously resembles a pre-paradigm change mass – “Transforming society and reality as we know it in the present moment, we are spectators of a precise moment where fiction… magic are becoming science facts. The arrival of the internet of things…”

Should we say ‘Amen’? Or perhaps… Are we creating digital immortality or could we become digitally immortal in a Google cloud of souls?

Paulo Arraiano

Sensorial Divinities @ Dimora Artica

Sensorial Divinities

Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel, rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, acrylic wall with aluminium frame

 is a kinetic installation by the Chinese artist duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.

The work was originally produced for the exhibition „Tales of Our Time“ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2016, where it has been on view until 2017. The installation is currently on view at the 58th International Art Exhibition, the Biennale in Venice, Italy, as part of the main exhibition, curated by Ralph Rugoff, currently director of the Hayward Gallery in London. Interestingly enough, the title of this year’s Biennale is titled „May You Live In Interesting Times“, which refers to a phrase of English invention that has long been mistakenly cited as an ancient Chinese curse that invokes periods of uncertainty, crises and turmoil, which becomes immanent, watching Yuan’s and Yu’s installation at it’s Sisyphean work.

, the artist duo has placed a gigantic mechanical construction with a robotic arm, one often seen on production lines such as those in car manufacturing, inside a hermetic glass cabinet ranging between display case and cage-like observation room in a laboratory, separating the splashing robot from the viewer. The predator-prey relationship between the two and the power structure between them oscillates from states of protection to voyeurism, creating an alternating state of mutual interest and indifference.

The robot is trained by the artists (in collaboration with two robotics engineers), to perform thirty-two different movements, gestures and dance-like poses, which let’s the machine turn, flex and „booty-shake“ as part of it’s choreography. Simultaneously, the robot is tasked with ensuing a thick, deep red liquid stays within predetermined area. The blood-like fluid naturally oozes away constantly from the designated area, triggering the visual-recognition sensors and engaging the machine to shovel it back into place with it’s rubber brush end, leaving smudges on the ground and splashes on the surrounding walls. The splashed and smeared molasses-like liquid enhances the overall contrast between organic and artificial, clinically sterile and excessive mess of the installation.

As the installation is a constant interplay between the robot and the fluid, it evokes questions about the relationship and the interrelated vulnerabilities between the organic and the mechanical. With 

, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu examine an increasingly automated global reality, one in which territories are controlled mechanically and the relationship between people and machines is rapidly changing. However, the bloodstain-like marks that accumulate around the installation also evoke subtle awareness of the violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zones as a consequence of an increasing use of technology to monitor our environment as part of different political agendas in the past, present and possible future.

The artist duo’s large installations often incorporate technological components that often instigate powerful physical and psychological reactions in the viewer. Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s works often challenge systems of political and social authority, as they exemplify critical comments on the modern understanding and exercise of political constructs like the nation-state, sovereign territory, freedom, and democracy.

Sun Yuan + Peng Yu @ Biennale Arte 2019

Can't Help Myself

In his practice, London-based artist Steve Bishop focuses on creating complex, surreal spatial environments that conjure subtle emotional states through the evocation of abstract, biographically informed, dream-like parallel worlds. His objects, films, and sculptures address questions of remembrance and how architectural spaces can reflect interior states.

 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Bishop builds upon a body of research that focuses specifically on the fragility of memory and the potential for its preservation, defying the gradual breakdown of matter through the effects of time.

A | Lion’s mane mycelium (Hericium erinaceus) on supplemented saw-dust blocks, shelving, polyethylene-enclosed environment, humidity and temperature controllers, ultrasonic humidifiers, ventilation fans and ducting, water tanks, PVC crash doors, PVC flooring, lighting and lighting gels

B | SD video (1min 39sec, 480p, 4:3, color)

C | Six framed oil and acrylic paintings on canvas

D | Lion’s mane mycelium (Hericium erinaceus) on supplemented saw-dust blocks, fridge

E | HD video (24min, 1080p, colour, 16:9, sound)

The exhibition is based on two distinct but interrelated pillars: one of which is a deserted town in northern Canada that was built in 1981 to house the workers of a nearby mine and then abandoned in 1983, captured in a video work as part of the exhibition. Its remarkably intact state is due to the constant struggle to prevent the surrounding forest from reclaiming the town and is a testament to the live-in caretaker, who ensures that the lawns are mowed and the buildings are heated. The other point of departure is the unique restorative qualities of the lion’s mane mushroom: an edible, bulbous-looking mushroom native to the forests of North America, Europe and Asia that has shown a remarkable ability to stimulate the synthesis of nerve growth factor in the brain. Lion’s mane is sold as a dietary supplement for memory enhancement and is being researched as a potential medicine for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

A large structural frame covered in a semi-opaque polyethylene tarp retains the specific air conditions needed for growing the mushrooms within the exhibition space. The tarp is both a practical element and a conceptual membrane, setting apart the two realms that frame the exhibition; the world where the mushrooms grow and that of the town. Paintings reproduced from the town are displayed behind the tarp, suggesting a fuzziness or out-of-reach quality. In the context of the exhibition, the preservation of the town, the uses of the mushroom, and the growing of the mushrooms in the gallery are brought together as interrelated symbols of “caretaking” and “maintenance,” summoning a feeling of something suspended in the oblique feeling of half-remembering.

The work displays a certain sense of aliveness, a charge that highlights a vulnerability in the process of continual growing and in turn deliquescing in a cyclical progression. Bishop strikes a delicate balance between a social blankness and a familiar—if not personal—specificity that both stimulate sensations of a shared consciousness.

Steve Bishop

KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Deliquescing

Christopher Meerdo

Channeling

New media artist Tabita Rezaire uses her “digital healing activism” to challenge existing colonial power structures through the world wide web. Rezaire’s cross-dimensional works, video-installations and exhibitions are expressions of an urge to heal an overall present disconnect as a modern phenomenon. Her work and healing strategies aim to reconnect body, uterus-mind and spirit in order to rehabilitate the repressive colonial hierarchies of the knowledge systems that define the dominant narratives of our present. Rezaire as a self-proclaimed “infinity incarnated into an agent of healing” strives to activate healing processes as a domino-effect of regenerating oneself. 

In her artistic practice, Rezaire investigates anti-colonial self-healing through the power of technology. Her work navigates through the structures of power and addresses the ubiquitous matrix of coloniality and its impact on knowledge, technology, sexuality and spirituality. Abstaining from any formative boundaries, Rezaire dissects the hidden paradigms and forces a critical engagement with her own artistic means.

 is its extension as a virtual reality experience, that takes the viewer to a rendered version of Google Earth’s underwater surface. Some web users claimed to have located Atlantis on the virtual map: Strange structures that appeared to be visible from above through the surface of the water off the coast of Morocco in the online map’s visuals fueled the wildest speculations. The shapes had features of an ordered architectural structure underwater, therefore rumors were literally afloat that it in fact could be the lost Atlantis that had been located. There are five portals in the middle of Rezaire’s virtual reality, allowing the visitor to enter this African spiritual landscape between information, communication, technology and the wisdom of fortune telling.

 is an exploration of the layers between ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), African divination systems, the mushroom underworld, communication per se and quantum physical laws in order to deduce and rethink our information lines. 

 follows the idea that ICT acts as a reflection of the organic world, which can heal or intoxicate in accordance to the consumer’s and user’s behaviour, and examines the cybernetic spaces in which the organic, technological and spiritual worlds are connected. How about using these biological or esoteric systems to accelerate and strengthen the technological system of modern information processing and the necessary control? 

overcomes the dichotomies between organism, spirit, device and investigates the spiritual connections as a network of communication and the potential of anti-colonial technologies. Rezaire implicates how – contrary to Eurocentric thinking – our information highway might have its roots in African spirituality. Actual scientific investigations relate the birth of computer science to African divination systems, such as the Ifa system of the Yoruba in East Africa, which seems to be the origin of binary mathematics, which is the basic functional principle of computer science. But how and why did this origin and knowledge disappear into oblivion, and how did it become obsolete in favour of Western achievements? Tabita Rezaire explores these questions and demonstrates the discrepancy of modern times.

 Overcoming the learnt thinking patterns and prejudices, her work proposes a new kind of connectivity and lots of new potentials. The often emphasised human potential for complex communication is refuted by the observation of underground mushroom networks and their function as communication and information transmitters. This dense mesh of tiny plant structures creates a communication network and is used to share informations. In addition, a form of spatial intelligence develops. Ancient traditional cultures have known for a long time how to communicate with nature and how to transfer this knowledge. Western culture prefers to celebrate modern technologies rather than these given information databases and therefore not only praises the result of institutional violence, but continues to reproduce it to this day without considering its possible replacement by nature.

In Rezaire’s research on dynamic networks of artificial, spiritual, and biological environments, a mystic techno-consciousness entrenches itself in the politics of possibilities where it could promote a symbiosis of mind and body, and mind and technology. As an artist, Rezaire does not link her work to the viewer’s expectations, instead she simply accesses different perspectives on these themes and tries to counteract the extinction of knowledge. Conspiracies, secrecy and conscious misinformation have been a known tactic of manipulation and conditioning for centuries, affecting the welfare of our societies. While digging into healing technologies and strategies to regenerate ourselves and to understand ourselves better, the observer senses that energetic and spiritual work is fundamental to the process. Her artwork faces itself to the dominant narratives of the misconception that everything of value has originated in the West, while at the same time actually reveal a wide field of different sources and stories to the viewer. As a consequence, a level of awareness is created about how what we consider legitimate has been purposefully developed to distance us from our power and our actions. 

 is Rezaire’s contribution to a non-Western written history and dogma of its knowledge. It can be perceived as a practice of repositioning within the narratives of the past, determined to actively creating an alternative future, where the big disconnect will be healed.

 was commissioned for UNREAL by NRW- Forum Düsseldorf Museum, Germany, while the video work 

 has been commissioned by Impakt @EMARE, Netherlands.

Rezaire is a founding member of the South African based creative collective NTU, half of the duo Malaxa and refers to herself as the mother of the energy house SENEB. Rezaire has shown her work internationally at the Berlin Biennale, Tate Modern London, the Museum of Modern Art Paris, MoCADA NY, The Broad, Los Angeles and at many other institutions, exhibitions and festivals. She currently lives and works in Cayenne, French Guiana.