SIGHT + SOUND International Digital Art Festival curated by Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender

Eastern Bloc presents its 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND FESTIVAL virtually this summer.

Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World

June 29 to August 31st, 2021

At the forefront of the experimental digital art scene in Quebec since 2007, Eastern Bloc presents the 11th edition of the SIGHT + SOUND International Digital Art Festival this summer. Titled Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World, this year’s festival will be held completely online between June 29th and August 31st. Running for two months, the audience will have the opportunity to participate in Eastern Bloc’s main annual event and join the reflections of 16 artists from Canada and abroad. 

The online exhibition will take place on the purpose build website [www.sightandsound.online] and access will be free, however the audience will be encouraged to make a suggested donation to support Eastern Bloc’s mandate of promoting emerging artists - with all proceeds going towards funding the artist fee’s of the next edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival, in 2022. 

The 2021 edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival takes advantage of the immobility we have all been forced into to propose a reflection about the aesthetics and politics of space and representation. Curated by Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender, the artworks help us imagine and speculate on what “space” really means in a post-internet and post-pandemic world. The exhibition invites online users to delve into the worlds produced by contemporary artists, provoking us to think about what kind of spaces we want to inhabit in the years to come. The curators selected net art, videos, and videogames exploring spaces beyond perspective and cartesian referentes. The artists move away from realism, or engage with it critically. They ask questions, not attempting to provide linear solutions. Most of all, they virtually hold the visitors’ hands during immersive, multidimensional experiences to reconfigure the “fourth wall” to which we are mostly submitted to during our day to day lives facing flat screens. 

The title of the 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival paraphrases Olia Lialina’s Some Universe (2002), a link-free site inspired by the popular star backgrounds on the early web. Like many of Lialina’s works, this net art piece functions as an archive of the aesthetics and vernacular roots of the internet. I like the vagueness and unpretentiousness implied in the title of Lialina’s piece. But I admire it even more for its archival impulse: to create it the artist extracted as many outer space backgrounds she could find on the web in 2002. The evocation of the infinite universe and the stars, which often stand for the future also resonates with this curatorship.

Participating Artists: AAA Collective (AU; AR; РФ/; DE; US; FR); Banz & Bowinkel (DE); Ronnie Clarke (CA); Mara Eagle (US/CA); Anna Eyler – Nicolas Lapointe (CA); Philippe Pasquier and Miles Thorogood (CA), Jiwon Ham (KR/ US); JakyuNG Lee (KR/ US); Olia Lialina (РФ/DE); Frances Adair McKenzie and Alisha Piercy (CA); Fallon Simard – Amery Sandford (CA); Timothy Thomasson

More information: sightandsound.online

KSB's Digital Lab #2 with LaTurbo Avedon, Peggy Schoenegge and Tina Sauerlaender

June, 15, 2021, 3 pm CEST

As a part of the Digital Lab #2, peer to space’s curators Peggy Schoenegge and Tina Sauerlaender will participate together with artist LaTurbo Avedon in a panel on AI and co-creation.

Full program here

Virtual Worlds - The Future Of WebVR and SocialVR in Art and Society

Virtual Worlds - The Future Of WebVR and SocialVR in Art and Society

Wednesday June 16, 5 - 5.55 pm CEST

As a part of the 1000Vordenker’s talk series 55 Min Gatherings, peer to space’s director & head curator Tina Sauerlaender will speak about SocialVR’s and WebVR’s impact on the art scene during the pandemic and its consequences for our society and its further developments.

More information: 1000Vordenker.com

Watch the short version of the talk here.

Tina Sauerlaender participates in VRHAM!'s REAL-IN conference

REAL-IN CONVENTION

Immersive Technologies in Interactive Arts

Fri, June 11, 2021 , 10-3.30 pm CEST

The conference aims to bring together artists, producers, cultural institutions, policy makers, industry experts and researchers to explore the potentials of 3D-scanning and volumetric capture technologies for interactive and digital arts. With XR technologies becoming increasingly more accessible, how can creatives seize the opportunity to produce courageous and inventive artistic content? How can technological tools and immersive storytelling be used to develop innovative participatory and social audience experiences? And how to create an immediate and lasting ecosystem that inspires new ideas and drives creative advancement?

Full program here

Watch the talk here

SPACELAB – Into the Unknown

Borghildur Indrida, SPACELAB - Into the Unknown, 2021

Artist: Borghildur Indrida

Curators: Gloria Aino Grzywatz and Peggy Schoenegge

Opening: June 4, 2021, 7-10 pm CEST

Artist Talk (InstaLive): June 10, 2021, 7 pm

Finissage: June 12, 2021, 7 pm

June 4 – 12, 2021 at Hošek Contemporary

The exhibition SPACELAB – Into the Unknown represents the starting point of the artistic project Artist on the Moon. Reflecting our role as humans within the solar system, Borghildur Indrida plans to be the first artist to fly to the moon, realizing an artistic performance in space.

The moon has always been an object of international interest. Since the 1950s, various countries have raced to land missiles and crews in order to be the first to gather information about the distant luminary. Major nations such as the United States, the former Soviet Union or China succeeded and explored small areas of the moon. As a symbol of conquest, they raised flags and removed moon rocks, asserting territorial claims.

These claims of power illustrate imperialist structures, which Borghildur Indrida explores and questions. Flying to the moon herself, the artist rejects nationalized interplanetary relations reminiscent of a colonial past. As an act of national disempowerment, she looks for a way of restitution by bringing back the moon stones to where they belong. In this process, patriarchal patterns within space exploration also become visible, which she deconstructs in equal measure. Borghildur Indrida occupies the supposedly male domain as a female artist and reinterprets it as an artistic space, breaking up structures of power.

SPACELAB - Into the Unknown creates a laboratory situation, which allows a comprehensive scientific consideration of Borghildur Indrida’s project. In a site-specific installation at the ship hold of Hošek Contemporary, visitors are immersed into the artistic discourse. The artist confronts us with fundamental questions of systems of power and ownership interests. What claims are being made in relation to unmanned territories? What hierarchies and systems emerge? How can women assert themselves within patriarchal structures? In the artist's peaceful gesture of restitution, the complexity and insanity of nationalized power relations clarify and remind us of our position in the solar system. With the gaze toward and the journey to the moon, the focus of our being is directed to the essential – an equalized, respectful and participatory society without exploitation.

More Information

ONE TO ONE #4 - We Are All Under The Same Sky

We Are All Under the Same Sky

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (artist)

Mara-Johanna Kölmel (curator) 

GRAND OPENING Friday, 14th of May, 2021 from 7 to 9 PM CEST

PRISKA PASQUER VIRTUAL GALLERY

hubs.mozilla.com/2ZBNWda/PRISKA_PASQUER_VIRTUAL_GALLERY/

We Are All Under the Same Sky questions the significance of the body in our technological present by addressing both our physical and virtual realities within networked, globalized, and data-driven worlds. How are we still connected to each other regardless of our physical locations? What do these different kinds of connections involve? How do such connections maintain traditional power relations or give them new forms? 

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer's transmedial practice strives to break down hegemonic narratives by challenging interfaces, modes of spectatorship, and materialities. By connecting references to net culture, neocolonial landscapes, ecologies, and globalization, their work seeks out the potential for the respective transformations of these phenomena. This artistic approach can be experienced sensually in the exhibition space, which has transported the Priska Pasquer Gallery onto a cloud. As crucial element of digital infrastructures, the cloud is an important concept for the artist and curator. It therefore becomes the central visual metaphor of the exhibition, through which power relations inscribed in the digital sphere are explored.

The show thus becomes a plea for alternative infrastructures to expose and counter oppressive regimes. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s solo show, curated by Mara-Johanna Kölmel, reminds us that we all live under the same sky. In doing so, the exhibition pleads for radical togetherness as an alternative to the feigned empathy implicit in our constant social connectedness.

We Are All Under the Same Sky is based on the title of one of Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s works. The exhibition builds on the shared interests of the artist and the curator Mara-Johanna Kölmel, who met as fellows at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Mara-Johanna Kölmel’s curatorial projects regularly unite international scholars, curators, activists and practitioners to explore the digital sphere as a site for methodological experimentation, social activism and artistic intervention. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer considers the implications of existence within networked globalized life and explores their interest in the societal transformations of modern cybernetics. In essence, their works examine how our digital reality redefines nature. 

More information: Priskapasquer.art

Online Symposium on Sculpture in the (Post) Digital Age

THE SCULPTURAL IN THE (POST) DIGITAL AGE

May 26 and 27, 2021 (Full Program here)

Digital technologies have profoundly impacted the arts by expanding the field of sculpture. A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of the so-called 'Aesthetics of the Digital', referring, above all, to screen-based phenomena. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‚materialized‘ using digital technologies. This is surprising given that computers became an artistic medium in the 1950s, CNC technology was used as early as the 1960s, and 3D scanning and printing processes came to prominence in the 1980s. The symposium aims to discuss current research perspectives on historical and contemporary sculptural phenomena, in particular, how digital technologies re-configure the understanding of sculpture and the sculptural.

The following questions serve as guides for the topics that will be discussed:

How are concepts of monumentality and site-specificity altered, when sculptures easily circulate as files online and can be 3D printed at any time? If artists now model their sculptures with software, how can we make sense of their spatiality, plasticity and materiality? When an object can no longer be grasped in a tactile sense, which modes of perception are addressed? How can we think of an object that arises from an algorithm and appears as pixels on a screen without sharing the same spatial conditions as the viewer? How do we experience objects that only become visible through an app? What ontological status do such computer-aided works possess that can be experienced both physically (for example 3D printing) and virtually (on screen)? How can we interpret concepts of authorship in times of digital coproduction and artificial intelligence? Which forms of participation or interaction does the respective interface address? How does this experience affect the "aesthetic border”?

Through systematic, interdisciplinary and historical examination, the symposium will contribute to discussions on the sculptural in the (post-) digital age with the goal of advancing reflections on the artistic medium for our technological present.

Conception
Ursula Ströbele (Study Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, Central Institute for Art History, Munich) and Mara-Johanna Kölmel (Institute for Art History and Philosophy, Leuphana University, Lüneburg).

SHOW ME YOUR SHEROES - curated by Gloria Aino Grzywatz

Zohar Fraiman, Allegory of Love, 125 x 135 cm, oil on canvas, 2021

SHOW ME YOUR SHEROES

Artist: Zohar Fraiman

Curator: Gloria Aino Grzywatz

ONE TO ONE exhibition series

PRISKA PASQUER Virtual Gallery Space

Opening April 15, 7 pm CET

Peer to space’s curator Gloria Aino Grzywatz curates the solo show SHOW ME YOUR SHEROES of the artist Zohar Fraiman. The exhibition takes place at PRISKA PASQUER’s virtual gallery space as a part of the ONE TO ONE exhibition series from April 15 to May 13, 2021, followed by a solo exhibition at the gallery’s premises in Cologne, Germany later this year.

The exhibition Show Me Your Sheroes creates a surreal, glowing world of color and form, establishing a dialogue with Zohar Fraiman's colorful works. Using humor, Fraiman questions the practice of internet-based self-staging and criticizes exaggerated and distorted ways of expressing both gender and the self within image-based networks and social platforms. In her works, the artist refers to animated films and TV series like those created by Disney like Snow White and Alice in Wonderland which show manufactured images of women. The works in this exhibition, as well as the exhibition title, is sparked by the Warren Buffet quote: „Tell me who your heroes are, and I'll tell you how you're going to turn out“. How do representations of femininity in digital space shape our understanding of gender? How can we free ourselves from stereotypical thought patterns?

Online Exhibition opens on April 15, 7 pm CET

>>> Enter the exhibition here <<<

Another Person In You – New Iteration of PARS PRO TOTO

Yarli Allison, In Virtual Return You (can't) Dehaunt 於虛擬的彼岸 魂(不)散, video, still, 2020

ANOTHER PERSON IN YOU 

Online from April 1 to June 30, 2021

Works by Meggy Rustamova, Yarli Allison, Nina Mangalanayagam

Curated by Gloria Aino Grzywatz

The fifth iteration of PARS PRO TOTO focuses on language as part of our identity. The stories of artists Meggy Rustamova, Yarli Allison, and Nina Mangalanayagam explore how the language we think and interact in influences the way we are. Just like the individual self of its speaker, each language has its own history and cultural origins. As such, it expresses particular cultures, both individually and collectively. Language as a crucial form of communication connects and divides us equally. It influences our specific perception of reality, provides information about our own identity and simultaneously shapes it. The exhibition title refers to the Czech adage Every language is a person in you. This saying reflects the influence of language on our self-perception and view of the world. Who am I when I think or speak in a certain language? Do I see the world differently depending on the language I speak?

peertospace.eu/parsprototo

Resonant Realities - VR Art Exhibition curated by Tina Sauerlaender

RESONANT REALITIES

Exhibition of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin

Featuring the works of the grant recipients: Banz & Bowinkel, Evelyn Bencicova, Patricia Detmering, Armin Keplinger and Lauren Moffatt

April 16 – June 6, 2021 at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin

Each individual perceives the world through different lenses. Our personal views determine our impressions of our surroundings. Communication and exchange enable the possibility of encountering and understanding other outlooks. This act can be understood as a resonance of various realities. By putting one's own perspective in relation to another’s, it is possible to expand our own. In the best case, this process may create an open and empathetic coexistence within our society.

In the exhibition space, we interact with virtual reality artworks that here form a digital resonance of the physical world. We encounter virtual beings, observe interpersonal exchanges, and witness arrangements among artificial intelligence. The digital works resonate in the exhibition space in corresponding site-specific installations. The contrast between the physical and computer-generated worlds reveals the divergent parameters that apply to each location. Depending on the environment and one’s own viewpoint, the objects appear in variants and communication follows a different set of rules.

The artistic works reveal a deeper understanding of the digital realm and present technology as a human product which is inextricably linked to our values and norms. Our engagement with these works unlocks the possibility of questioning our relationship to culture, to our fellow human beings, and to the machines and technologies that surround us. This process consequently prompts a reexamination of our thoughts and actions.

Curated by: Tina Sauerlaender (Artistic Director)

More information: vrkunst.dkb.de

Online Events and Timeslot booking: hal-berlin.de

Image credits: Patricia Detmering, Aporia, 2020 / Evelyn Bencicova, Arielle Esther, Joris Demnard (Ikonospace), Artificial Tears, 2019 / Lauren Moffatt, Image Technology Echoes, 2020 / Banz & Bowinkel, Poly Mesh, 2020 / Armin Keplinger, THE ND-Serial, 2020/2021

PORTRAIT OF A FUTURE

Peer to space’s curator Peggy Schoenegge curates the solo show PORTRAIT OF A FUTURE. of the artist Charlie Stein. The exhibition takes place at PRISKA PASQUER’s virtual gallery space as a part of the ONE TO ONE exhibition series from March 10 to April 6, 2021, followed by a solo exhibition at the gallery’s premises in Cologne, Germany later this year.

The exhibition title PORTRAIT OF A FUTURE is derived from Charlie Stein’s series Portrait Of A Future Self (2019-2021). The female robots free themselves from the constraints of their intended purposes and turn both gender clichés and the relationships between humans and machines on their heads. In light of the increasing significance of robot technologies in our daily lives, questions emerge about their social functions. Robots are produced by humans and therefore shaped by our norms and values. Charlie Stein's works open up the opportunity for reflection. In the future, will we continue to reproduce stereotypical role models in the machines we are creating? Or do we have a desire to change and develop a more open, diverse and fair existence to shape our future?

>>> Enter the exhibition here <<<

Charlie Stein, Autumn Magnet, Painting, 2020

Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters curated by Mara-Johanna Koelmel

Online-Exhibition Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters curated by peer to space Associate Director & Curator Mara-Johanna Koelmel for Akademie Schloss Solitude.

With Nora Al-Badri, Johanna Bruckner, Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism), Jan Nikolai Nelles, Miriam Simun, Natasha Tontey

On view: Technische Sammlungen Dresden and Online

The physical opening at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden will be set according to the Saxon Corona Protection Ordinance. Currently, the Technische Sammlungen Dresden are closed.

Online-Opening March 4th at 7 PM. More information here.

The online exhibition Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters brings together the works of six artists and former Akademie Schloss Solitude fellows. Their contributions question and critically engage with heteronormative worldviews around consciousness research, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and self-experience.

Like a networked mind, the show unfolds amid several nodes of access by expanding from its own online space to the show Mind Over Matter at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden. As such, the works explore the concerns of the exhibition curated by Netzwerk Medien Kunst Dresden from a speculative, feminist, and decolonial point of view.

In dialogue with Mind over Matter, the artistic interventions speak about mechanisms of power, exclusion, and oppression encoded into the very concepts underpinning digital technologies. Yet they equally mobilize the digital medium to propose alternative visions for shared futures that are not exclusively white or Western.

The artists of Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters probe the power of a collective intelligence that reaches from the enhanced to the monstrous, the ancestral to the futurist, the molecular to the planetary, and from the human to the non-human. With creativity and visionary fuel, they unlock the digital realm as a space that comes with response-ability – the ability to respond to its architectures of power and to think with, to care for those it chooses to forget, erase, and leave behind.

***

Online Space by parmon

Design by Stephan Thiel and Anne Lippert
Exhibition architecture by Atelier Adhoc Arhitectura (George Marinescu & Maria Daria Oancea)

The hybrid exhibition project Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters is part of the exhibition Mind over Matter of the Netzwerk | Medien | Kunst Dresden and takes place in cooperation with Digital Solitude program of Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Supported by: The Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and the Ministry of Research, Science and the Arts Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Cooperation partner: Netzwerk | Medien | Kunst Dresden of friendsofDresdenContemporaryArt e.V. (DCA) in cooperation with the  Digital Solitude program of Akademie Schloss Solitude

LIGHT SHINES THROUGH THE CURTAINS OF TIME

Ornella Fieres, Inverse Fourier 36, 2021 (c) the artist

>>> Enter the exhibition here <<<

On February 10, 2021, peer to space and PRISKA PASQUER kick off PRISKA PASQUER's new ONE TO ONE exhibition series in the new virtual gallery space on Mozilla Hubs with the exhibition LIGHT SHINES THROUGH THE CURTAINS OF TIME, solo exhibition by Ornella Fieres, curated by Tina Sauerlaender.

PRISKA PASQUER's virtual gallery space on Mozilla Hubs will be inaugurated with a new exhibition series called ONE TO ONE, that signifies that the artist and curator are meeting at eye level and developing an exhibition in a mutual exchange. For the kick-off of the ONE TO ONE series, peer to space and PRISKA PASQUER gallery cooperate. In the upcoming months, four curators from peer to space will each present one of four artists whose work addresses the impact of digitization on the individual and society. Curator Tina Sauerlaeender and artist Ornella Fieres will kick things off with the exhibition Light Shines Through The Curtains Of Time.

The title of the exhibition was borrowed from the video work I create paths that lead to the clouds in which we go (2020), in which an artificial intelligence creates a poetic-dystopian vision of the end times based on all the texts that have been written about Ornella Fieres' works to date. In the works of artist Ornella Fieres, new technologies meet analog found objects from times past. The artist instrumentalizes photographs from personal estates and archival material from scientific films for her own purposes. She is concerned with "transferring the past into the present and making the invisible processes of the digital visible." Her works show the world of yesterday, seen through the eyes of today's algorithms.

Exhibition on view from February 10 to March 9, 2021.

>>> Enter the exhibition here <<<

Tina Sauerlaender on a Pioneer of Self-Portraiture in Computer Art: Joan Truckenbrod

Ripped Distance, 1982, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Rites of Passage, 1984, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Lattice Vibrations, 1986, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

peer to space’s Director & Head Curator, Tina Sauerlaender, who currently pursues a PhD on Artistic Self-Representation in Digital Art at Art University in Linz (Austria), introduces a pioneering position of self-portraiture in computer art. For one decade, the artist Joan Truckenbrod researched and reflected on her self-image by using the latest digital technologies for her works during the 1980s.

Read Tina Sauerlaender’s article on Joan Truckenbrod for ZI Spotlight, the blog of the German Central Institut for Art History here.

Mirror, Mirror – New Iteration of PARS PRO TOTO

Online from October 1 to December 31, 2020

Works by Jonas Blume, Patricia Detmering, Bianca Kennedy

Curated by Gloria Aino Grzywatz and Peggy Schoenegge

In Cooperation With medienkunst e.V. - Verein für zeitgenössische Kunst mit neuen Medien

The third iteration of PARS PRO TOTO explores how self can be constructed with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The artists Jonas Blume, Patricia Detmering and Bianca Kennedy offer AIs their private content or allow them to become an active agent of the artwork. They explore how AIs collect personal and convert data into another form of the artist’s identity. Their works blur fictional and factual personal data into a synthetic personality. Jonas Blume reconciles his own biography with Apple’s Siri, resulting in an uncanny yet seemingly personal narrative. Bianca Kennedy lets an intelligent computer proclaim its own thoughts and feelings about its environment and its users. In a personal soliloquy, Patricia Detmering philosophizes about the perception and dissolution of reality. The artworks in Mirror, Mirror consider the interaction between human and artificial intelligence. They question how today’s algorithms co-create and shape the identity of individuals. This process occurs every day as we are exposed to big data’s algorithms online. Our online identity seems to be a distorted mirror image existing independently from our real self, just like Snow White’s mirror becomes an independent-minded entity, shaping the actions of the person looking into it. What about our digital mirror image? Does it influence our self-perception and our actions?

peertospace.eu/parsprototo

peer to space’s curator Peggy Schoenegge at Golem-Labor Conference

peer to space’s curator Peggy Schoenegge will hold a keynote on Performing Arts in XR at Golem-Labor Conference.  

In the online conference, artists and XR experts will share their experiences, artistic projects and open dialogue on the intersection of art and immersive technologies. They will address questions on the intersection of the (performing) arts and (XR) technologies. How does the interaction of performing arts and technology impact the audience? How can the body and its physicality be experienced in VR? What are the limitations when working with Motion Capture technologies or Volumetric recording? And can the technology be more than just a tool?

The online conference is organized by gamelab.berlin and Goethe-Institut Prag. 

Further information 

Tina Sauerlaender becomes Art & Tech columnist for Netzpiloten.de

Tina Sauerlaender started to contribute to Netzpiloten.de with a column on Art & Tech on the German platform for the online magazine Netzpiloten.de that focuses on digital and tech.

Netzpiloten.de are among the digital pioneers in Germany. Founded in 1998 in Hamburg by Wolfgang Macht and Matthias Dentler, the company was one of the prominent representatives of the so-called New Economy. As such, it experienced the ups and downs of this economic phase with innovative network products. Today, the Netzpiloten, with around 75 employees in Hamburg, Berlin and Barcelona, work in the fields of digital marketing and digital publications. In particular, the independent magazine netzpiloten.de has accompanied the digital change for over 15 years.

See her first text on WebVR conferences here

See her profile on netzpiloten.de here

Tina Sauerlaender at AAMC panel on Reimagining Art in Virtual Realms

Reimagining art in Virtual Realms

A discussion on digital advancement and ways virtual realms can be used to reimagine exhibitions and social experiences.

> Watch panel here

As art organizations work towards becoming more digitally advanced many are turning to virtual, augmented, and extended reality to leverage technology engaging audiences. This webinar brings both international curators and artists into dialogue to discuss ways virtual realms can be used to reimagine exhibitions and social experiences, as well as reconsider the role of the spectator. Panelists will also address issues of collecting, conserving, and DEAI within the context of VR, AR, and XR.

Speakers:

Michael Kam Barngrover, XR Researcher / Developer, Koç University KARMA Lab

Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Creative Director / Artist, Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA)

Tina Sauerlaender, Director & Head Curator, peer to space

Tamiko Thiel, artist

Julie Walsh, Independent Curator of Digital Art, Walsh Projects; Moderator

Watch panel here

Mara Johanna-Kolmel's and Tina Sauerlaender's show for Kara Agora

Bunch of Kunst in Quarantine // Paradox Paradise

Artists: Uli Ap (UK), Katharina Arndt (DE), Lara Verena Bellenghi (AT), Hannah Bohnen (DE), Marta de la Figuera (ESP), Ornella Fieres (DE), Bettina Funke (DE), Sabine Funke & Karlheinz Bux (DE), Fabian Hesse (DE) & Mitra Wakil (AFG), Helena Hunter (UK), Dorien Lantin (DE) & Robert Hecht (DE), Marie-Eve Levasseur (CAN/DE), Martina Menegon (IT/AT), Filippo Minelli (IT), Chiara Passa (IT), Agnese Sanvito (IT), Susan Supercharged (US/UK), Thomas Teurlai (FR), Miloš Trakilovic (BIH/NL)

Curated by Mara-Johanna Kolmel and Tina Sauerlaender 

Opening: October 8, 2020, 7 to 9.30 pm CET

Ornella Fieres, I create paths that lead to the clouds in which we go, 2020, Video, 8:55 Min, © the artist

Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, Still Life, 3D-Scan, Screen Capture, 2020 © the artists

Chiara Passa, NULL (void *)0 a material cause architecture, 2017 © the artist

Marie-Eve Levasseur, tactile cravings (exhausted by oversharing everything), 2020 © the artist

Susan Supercharged, The Unlikely Friendship of Mike Tyson and Werner Herzog, 2020 © the artist

Uli Ap, Yellow Alienation, altered video still, immersive video installation, 2020 (c) the artist

Katharina Arndt, Constantly Practice To Take Relevant Selfies, detail, 2020 © the artist

Milos Trakilovic, XYZ, HD Video, 06.47 min, 2016 © the artist

Bunch of Kunst in Quarantine // Paradox Paradise is a virtual exhibition curated by Mara-Johanna Kolmel and Tina Sauerlaender. It turns its lens on artistic production in times of Corona and poses the question of how visual art - in the context of social distancing, national demarcation, domestic retreat, economic downturn, rising nationalism and encompassing surveillance - can open up alternative paths for reflection, transformation and solidarity. As such, Paradox Paradise symbolizes the state of living between the extremes unfolding between physical and the digital worlds. The exhibition at Kara Agora on Mozilla Hubs is a new iteration of Mara-Johanna Kolmel’s open call Instagram exhibition Bunch of Kunst in Quarantine // Reflections On The Viral Vacuum. This edition presents selected European artists from the first edition who have remodeled their artworks especially for the virtual exhibition space.

Further Information

Tina Sauerlaender speaks at Linoleum Festival about VR & Arts

September 3, 2020, 3 pm CET

For some years Virtual Reality has been making its way into artistic practice. Artists from all fields, including painting, sculpture and performance art, discover the medium for their work. The virtual space allows artists to work surrounded by a blank space where physical laws do not apply. In her talk, Berlin-based curator Tina Sauerlaender introduces the history of immersion, the development of the medium of virtual reality and its application in the field of visuals arts. She will speak about her experience as an international VR art curator, introduce her projects and Radiance VR, an international platform for artistic VR experiences that she co-founded.

Talk funded by the Goethe Institut in Kyiv.

More information