From June 1 to October 20 2024, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen presents an ambitious, international group exhibition that critically engages with “the family” as a tradition, idea, and lived reality. Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family untangles some of the crucial problems, beliefs, and contradictions that the family as an institution embodies and takes a close, critical view of family constructs across geographies, histories, and scales. The exhibition provides a rare overview of contemporary art practices relating to this topic, bringing together works by more than thirty-five artists in which notions of family—and representations of the stereotypical, bourgeois family in particular—are problematized.

The family is a rare topic in contemporary art. While feminist artists have thematized the roles of women, caretakers, and mothers, the family has—weirdly—largely been absent. To be sure, family life is a well-represented genre in photography, and the family has a long history in portraiture, but as a subject for critical investigation, beyond mere representation, the family has only rarely been addressed. It’s almost as if the family is considered unworthy of such examination because of how deeply it is nested in our reality. It has been naturalized to the point that it “just is.” As the writer Sophie Lewis put it recently: “So deep runs the idea that the family is the exclusive place where people are safe, where people come from, where people are made, and where people belong, it doesn’t even feel like an idea anymore.”

This relative lack of attention is remarkable, since—all things considered—the family is a problematic concept. Indeed, the family poses a problem, one that artists have long engaged with even if, curatorially and art historically, it has been largely neglected. The family is a source of exhaustion, conflict, and trauma. Moreover, it can be argued that the nuclear family, in particular, is a conservative, patriarchal structure that is fundamentally bound up with capitalism as a system. In its classical constellation—man-woman-child(ren)—the family also embodies a model that no longer aligns with many people’s understandings of gender, or simply no longer works. Finally, and perhaps most fatally: looking at how rapidly the climate crisis is progressing, one might seriously feel compelled to ask if putting children on this earth is still a responsible thing to do, given our fears about the future state of the world they will inherit.
The exhibition brings together important historic contemporary artworks by pioneering artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly, Bobby Baker, and PINK de Thierry and presents them in dialogue with works by artists from a younger generation, including Rhea Dillon, Kyoko Idetsu, and Lebohang Kganye. With its thematic scope, the exhibition goes beyond the purview of previous exhibitions that have focused on individual aspects or manifestations of the family—such as parenthood/motherhood and chosen or rainbow families—to address more comprehensively and fundamentally the (nuclear) family. It also differs from numerous exhibitions that have centered primarily on visual representations of the family in photography and painting.
To accompany the exhibition, a catalog featuring essays by leading academics and art historians will be published by Hatje Cantz. A study on the future of the family by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, one of the most renowned Swiss think tanks, is also set to be released on the day of the opening and will be available at: gdi.ch/familie.
Artists: Jonathas de Andrade, Louise Ashcroft, Shuvinai Ashoona, Bobby Baker, Nina Beier, BOLOHO, Louise Bourgeois, Kathe Burkhart, Vaginal Davis, Adolf Dietrich, Rhea Dillon, Laurence Durieu, Marie-Louise Ekman, Buck Ellison, Christina Forrer, Maria Guta/Lauren Huret, Nadira Husain, Juliana Huxtable, Kyoko Idetsu, Mary Kelly, Lebohang Kganye, Ghislaine Leung, Tala Madani, Katja Mater, Alexandra Noel, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ben Sakoguchi, Ju Sekyun, Sable Elyse Smith, Lily van der Stokker, Madeleine Kemény-Szemere, PINK de Thierry, Terre Thaemlitz, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Gillian Wearing, Ambera Wellmann

The Kunstmuseum St.Gallen presents the first solo museum exhibition of Jiajia Zhang (*1981 Hefei, China). Working mainly with photography and film, and with found footage in particular, her work has, to date, mainly comprised of elegiac, emotive, and often personal photo series and film collages. Zhang's work deals with the question as to how the stream of images from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok shapes our reality.

At the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Zhang will show new, site-specific works: a video, sculptures, and photographs that she made especially for the exhibition. In addition, selected artworks from the collection of the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen will be incorporated in the presentation.

Staged in the basement exhibition space of the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, the presentation takes the relationship between public and private as its central theme. The exhibition plays with the specific architecture of the basement exhibition space. With its exposed concrete walls and prominent ramp, this space is reminiscent of public or semi-public infrastructure, such as a train station underpass or an empty shopping arcade: spaces that connect and blur inside and outside.

The artist is interested in the tension between inside and outside, not only in an architectural sense but also how the balance between the two is currently redefined by social media. Her work explores the tension between the personal content of many images and videos shared online and the millions of people consuming them. This creates a public sphere that is permeated with personal images, private narratives, and vulnerable moments. The experience of this content, its consumption, is also characterized by a peculiar mix of private and public: the images and videos are mostly consumed alone, in a private setting – in one's own bed, on the sofa, in the privacy of one's home, despite the fact that so many look at them, often at the same time. As such, videos and images that are shared, liked, and viewed by millions are consumed by individuals alone.

Zhang’s exhibition emphasizes the peculiar atmosphere of the exhibition space as a transitional space, by adding elements taken from public space. At the same time, the artist will incorporate artworks and installative elements that refer to the domestic sphere, such as warm lighting and furniture. Thus, the – at times immersive – exhibition oscillates between cold, anonymous infrastructure and intimate, private moments. A kind of "inner public" emerges, whose emotionality and experience are central to Zhang's art.

Jiajia Zhang studied architecture at ETH Zurich from 2001-2007 and photography at the International Center of Photography, New York from 2007-2008. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2020. Her work has been part of various group exhibitions including Swiss Art Awards, Basel (2022); Werkstipendium Zürich (2022); FriArt, Fribourg (2022); Kunsthaus Glarus (2021); Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris (2021); Haus Wien (2020); Kunsthalle Zürich (2020); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2019). In 2021, COALMINE, Winterthur hosted her solo exhibition “If Every Day Were a Holiday, Towns Would Be More Mysterious”, and in the fall of 2022, she received the Shizuko Yoshikawa Grant. Zhang is currently completing a six-month residency at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan.

Publication to accompany Jiajia Zang's solo exhibiton at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (April 2023-October 2023)

AUTOFICTION

With Gina Fischli, Clémence Lollia Hilaire, Kinke Kooi, Perri MacKenzie, Win McCarthy, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Trevor Shimizu, Lily van der Stokker and Bruno Zhu .

"It is Impossible not to Be Dealing with Clichés When Drawing Flowers" – Ree Morton

A work of art doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is born out of life, a specific reality, which is to say: the materialization of an art practice has to do with rent, studio space, money, family, time, education, mental health, etc., etc. AUTOFICTION focuses on how all of this informs an artwork. It brings together artworks that draw from the personal and autobiographical. Sometimes the results are funny and weird; at other times, they’re tentative and open-ended. Standards and conventions are invoked to provide contrast (Bruno Zhu, Kinke Kooi), and the personal is measured against art historical grandeur (Gina Fischli) and literary and painterly conventions (Trevor Shimizu through the use of memoir, and Perri MacKenzie by invoking the tradition of the nude in painting). The everyday and the literal are held up against the gallery wall (Lily van der Stokker), lunch is served (Phung-Tien Phan) and strangers are met (Josiane M.H. Pozi).

The show’s point of departure is the work of the American artist Ree Morton,* whose work I became infatuated with when I had just given birth, almost two years ago. It seems crazy to say, but as soon as I’d had my baby, I desperately wanted to go back to work. I desperately wanted my ability to think clearly back and to regain the sense of control I’d managed to maintain in the last few years. But now there were hormones, exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and of course there were bottles to make, diapers to change, etc. There was too much life and not enough work. And even when I managed to carve out a moment for myself at my desk, everything was cloudy. How was I supposed to function, professionally, when so much life was spilling over into my work? At the same time, I was also struggling with the fact that in so many ways I was inhabiting a giant cliché – that of the overwhelmed, overly emotional mother, unable to make it work. It was all supposed to have been so rosy, baby pink, a dream come true.

It was then that I opened the catalogue I’d picked up from the Ree Morton retrospective at the ICA in Philadelphia in 2019. I was drawn to Morton’s work because it uses a language that refers to her personal life – that of a divorced mother of three – in complex and sometimes also dark ways. Motherhood, with Ree Morton, seems unresolved, ambiguous, heavy and fun. Phrases such as “Terminal Clusters”, “Fading Flowers”, and “Antidotes for Madness” are paired with various objects made of celastic – a type of pliable plastic used in set design. These objects – bows, aprons and ribbons – are painted in bright colors and are often held together by arcs dotted with light bulbs or structures that resemble the fronts of puppet theaters, which give the set-up a festive, circus-like feel, albeit with a slightly unhinged undertone.

The ambiguity I found in these works was appealing to me. It spoke to the intense feelings I was having at the time, both positive and negative. Morton’s works evoke the clichés of motherhood but make them stranger, weirder and more complex. The works in this exhibition, in similar ways, allude to the loaded topic of authorship, the figure behind a work. They do so, however, in incomplete ways; they resist defining this “I” conclusively. At a time when art institutions are fixated on artists’ biographies, this seems important.

*The American artist Ree Morton has an unusual biography: after giving birth to three children and living the itinerant, suburban life of a navy officer’s wife, Morton decided in the late 60s to become an artist (she was born in 1936). She got her BFA and MFA, divorced her husband and moved into a loft in New York, where she made unusual work beyond the artistic trenches of the time. Tragically, her life (and career) was very short: in 1977, aged 40, Morton died in a car accident.

All the modern things
Like cars and such
Have always existed
They've just been waiting in a mountain
For the right moment
Listening to the irritating noises
Of dinosaurs and people
Dabbling outside

Björk, «The Modern Things,» 1995

In the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, when I had just found out that I was pregnant, I bought a painting by Katja Mater, titled Time is an Arrow, Error. It shows a clock that is warped, the numbers jumping up and down, their order in disarray. This was two years ago. Ever since, time feels different, long and stretched out punctured only by fragmented Zoom calls. But then the past two years passed by so swiftly – just like that – and out of the cells in my womb a 17-month-old has grown with teeth and hair, who moves around in my living room, happily saying “no” to everything he sees (the only word he knows so far). And suddenly, it is spring again, we have gotten back to normal, can travel, go to work, move freely, and meet however many people we want. But inconceivably, there is also a war raging just 2000 km from here. Time is an Error.

The selected works in this edition of Open M deal with the concept and perception of time. This exhibition brings together a selection of artworks that reflect on how different periods of time come together: how the past breaks the present, how the present feels like the past and how time can be experienced differently, beyond the rigidity of the clock and the chronology of history books

After two years of a global pandemic and the uncertainty that came with it, many of us have lost the daily rhythm of our lives. The routines that until now had structured our days, our seasons, our years were suddenly no longer there. Time feels different: warped, stretched, and at the same time accelerated. The works in "Time and Again" allude to different notions, perceptions, and depictions of time. On display are, for instance, portraits of the fragile, conflicted and intensely happy time of adolescence (the photography of Muriel Verbist). Elsewhere, in the performative work of Josefien Cornette, bodily time is mapped as it carves itself, literally, into the body through scars. There is a reflection on the particular structuring of time in academia (through a persiflage of the typical PowerPoint presentation in the work of Paul Bogaert and Jan Peeters) and there are multiple works that, in different ways, reference the time of the pandemic (Muriel Verbist, Jean Luc van Ijperen and Bram Rinkel). The three large paintings by Laurence Durieu effectively synchronize different moments in the life of her family in densely narrative tableaux. The works brim with art historical references which further thickens their anachronistic quality. The collages by Bram Rinkel, on the other hand, refer to the collision of images online. They point to an understanding of time that the internet has made possible, levelling everything into one giant, timeless mass of content. There are a number of works that create references and associations to historical times: the religious iconography of Baroque painting for instance (Daniël Bellon), prehistoric time (Witold Vandenbroeck) which, in the case of Alexandra Crouwers’ tapestry, meets the icons of computer screens and the world of sci-fi. A combination of different temporalities can also be found in the works of De Pever Joke. They combine the slow medium of painting with snapshots of the everyday as we know it from the fleeting medium of Instagram. Finally, there are artworks that allude to and create certain expectations of/in time: the sculptures by Danny Vandeput that seem to wait until somebody plays with them, and the performance of Ralph Collier that creates moments of expectation and anticipation during the time of the opening.

With: Daniël Bellon, Paul Bogaert and Jan Peeters, Ralph Collier, Josefien Cornette, Alexandra Crouwers , Joke De Pever, Laurence Durieu, Bram Rinkel, Witold Vandenbroeck, Danny Vandeput, Jean-Luc van IJperen, Muriel Verbist

We live in a moment in which institutions, including those central to the art world, are facing a surge of public scrutiny. Propelled by social media, profound questions about how institutions operate—whether structurally, politically, or financially—have become an increasingly prominent part of public life and discourse in recent years.

In this context, The Art of Critique revisits the artistic practice of institutional critique to ask what it means today, and to consider its ability to respond to the urgent social, political, and economic issues of our time. Taking works by Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, and Sarah Lucas in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum as a departure point, The Art of Critique uses a feminist approach to broaden and challenge traditional art historical definitions of institutional critique. These expanded forms of critique function as precursors to the practices of the contemporary artists presented as part of this project. Collectively, the contemporary works shed a new light on the legacy of institutional critique while addressing structural issues as wide-ranging as labor practices in the creative industry, city development, gender inequality, and the intertwined histories of capitalism and colonialism.

The publication documents the long-term project at the Frans Hals Museum (2019–22) under directorship of Ann Demeester and based on a concept by Melanie Bühler—a symposium, Color Critique (chapter one); an exhibition, Image Power (chapter two: Image Critique); and artist commissions (chapter three: Structure Critique)—together with artworks, conversations, and newly commissioned and translated essays.

Edited by Melanie Bühler

With contributions by Marie Angeletti, Karen Archey, Ute Meta Bauer, Melanie Bühler, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Harry Burke, Ann Demeester, Clémence Lollia Hilaire, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Andrea Fraser, Simon Fujiwara, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Alex Kitnick, Lynne Kouassi, Erik van Lieshout, Lloyd Corporation, Sven Lütticken, Daniel Morgenthaler, Marlie Mul, Becket MWN, Grace Ndiritu, D’Ette Nogle, Ahmet Öğüt, Ima-Abasi Okon, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Bea Schlingelhoff, Hito Steyerl, Juan Uribe, Dena Yago.

Designed by Sabo Day
Co-published by Frans Hals Museum and Lenz Press

The publication was generously supported by Outset Contemporary Art Funds Netherlands and VriendenLoterij

Softcover, 288 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-10-2

Image Power
Institutional Critique Today

March 7 until September 20, 2020

Frans Hals Museum, location Hal

Image Power
'Image Power' is part of the exhibition series 'The Art of Critique'- an inquiry into contemporary forms of Institutional Critique. The exhibition series links the embodied, feminist forms of critique of Andrea Fraser, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas (in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum) to those employed by artists working today.

The first exhibition of the trilogy focuses on artistic strategies that challenge the status of the image and its value proposition in the slippery, extending terrain of art. As attention spans become ever shorter – due to the vast amounts of (visual) information that flood our screens daily – the function of the museum as an institution is often flattened into the mechanisms of online marketing, while its exhibitions are relegated to what the artist Dena Yago has called “content farms” in the service of social media. At the same time, communication online has become more and more visual, and visual codes have become increasingly sophisticated. This calls for new forms of visual literacy as well as forms of critique that have the potential to be just as visceral, emotional and affective as the images they address. This exhibition questions the status of art in this extended visual environment and asks how forms of critique can be articulated as part of this setting. The works of these artists exist as double entendres: they self-consciously exist as paintings, colorful murals, immersive environments and detailed drawings, yet they also comment on the status of the image as part of the current attention economy. As such, they present their critiques as seductions. Here critique is delivered in new forms, fully embedded within that which it confronts.

The Art of Critique
The artistic movement of Institutional Critique feels particularly urgent today, as we are witnessing an intense moment of “institutional critique” in society at large: fueled by social media, the critique of institutions – think of phenomena like #MeToo, Brexit and the large scale climate protests – is practiced everywhere with an intensity and at a scale that feels unmatched. At the same time, one can question whether it still makes sense to treat the art world as a separate institutional field now that art institutions align themselves more and more with profit-oriented thinking and impulses generated within the art field are quickly swallowed up by a larger creative industry

With:
A Maior (founded in 2011, Portugal) // Louise Ashcroft (1983, England, lives in London) // Gina Beavers (1978, Greece, lives in NYC) // Tony Cokes (1956 US, lives in Rhode Island) // Tracey Emin (1963, England, lives in London) // FLAME (artist duo founded in Brussels in 2010, lives in Berlin) // Sylvie Fleury (1961, Switzerland, lives in Geneva) // Andrea Fraser (1965, USA, lives in Los Angeles and New York) // Florence Jung (1986, France / Switzerland, lives in Paris) // Sarah Lucas (1962 England, lives in London) // Marlon Mullen (1963, USA, lives in Richmond) // Ima-Abasi Okon (1981, England, lives in London and Amsterdam) // Jaakko Pallasvuo (1987, Finland, lives in Helsinki) // Heji Shin (1976 Korea, lives in Berlin) // Cole Speck (1991, Canada, lives in Alert Bat, BC) // Tenant of Culture (1990, The Netherlands, lives in London) // Betty Tompkins (1945 USA, lives in New York) // Nora Turato (1991, Croatia, lives in Amsterdam) // Christine Wang (1985, USA, lives in San Francisco) // Dena Yago (1988, USA, lives in New York)

In the museum shop a special edition of a T-shirt by PMS (a project by the artist Marlie Mul) is available (PMS stands for “Premenstrual Syndrome”).

Curated by Melanie Bühler

This exhibition is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Fonds 21 and Friends of the Frans Hals Museum. The Frans Hals Museum is partner of the Bankgiro Loterij and the city of Haarlem.

The public program is supported by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Goethe-Institut The Netherlands.

Essay

My Broken Animal presents new and existing film, installation and sculpture by London-based artist Marianna Simnett (1986). At the heart of Simnett’s practice is her preoccupation with the body and its potential for transformation. Simnett’s bodies are mutants and hybrids, playing dangerous games to deadly limits. They faint, they undergo medical procedures, they die and they come back to life. Unflinching and raw, Simnett dares to uncover the parts of ourselves that usually remain concealed.

My Broken Animal disregards the oppositions that have been inscribed onto our perception of bodies: male versus female, sick versus healthy, animal versus human. Drawing on fairy tales, myths and through her own idiosyncratic storytelling, Simnett approaches conventions of gender, species, and our relationship to others, as not something given, but something to be found.

Simnett’s first solo show in the Netherlands combines her sculpture, film and installation for the first time, expanding her imaginative universe to multiple temporalities and mediums. Simnett’s solo exhibitions include the forthcoming Kunsthalle Zürich (2019), IMA Brisbane (2020), as well as the New Museum, New York (2018), and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018). Simnett won the Jerwood / FVU Award in 2014-15 and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017. She completed an MA at the Slade School of Art in 2013.

The British artist Lubaina Himid (Zanzibar, 1954) is one of the most important artists of the present moment. Himid was a central figure of the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s that demanded more visibility and recognition for Black artists and Black identity more broadly. Commitment to this movement has informed Himid’s practice ever since: her paintings, collages, drawings, and textile works address the invisibility of Black people—and especially of Black women—in Western culture. Her work challenges recorded history and questions power relations, often by celebrating the people who find themselves at the margins. Himid’s work is concerned with the question of belonging. How and when does one belong to a community, and how is this reflected in a given community’s ‘official’ culture? What are the stories we tell about our national treasures? And who and what is left out?

The presentation at the Frans Hals Museum marks Lubaina Himid’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands (on view at location Hal of the museum). The Grab Test is the title of the exhibition as a whole, as well as for the new work Himid created for the Frans Hals Museum: a monumental work for which Himid painted on Dutch wax cloths. The artist created this work in dialogue with the seventeenth-century damasks from the collection of the Frans Hals Museum (on view at location Hof of the museum). While the stark white damasks depict motifs and designs that refer to the wealth and cultural imagination of the time, Himid’s motifs speak to the beauty and richness of the everyday experiences of the women who buy and wear Dutch wax fabric.

Lubaina Himid moved to the UK at the age of four months with her mother, who worked as a textile designer. Having lived in the country ever since, Himid is currently based in Preston, in the North of England, where she is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Himid won the 2017 Turner Prize, one of the most prestigious contemporary art prizes. Over the last 30 years Himid has exhibited widely, both in Britain and internationally.

A Symposium on Colour as an Agent for Taste, Experience and Value in the Exhibition Space.

This symposium is dedicated to the use of colour and its function in the exhibition space. At the beginning of 2019, the walls of the exhibition Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise in Frans Hals Museum – Hal changed from a neutral white to a yellow-green that becomes increasingly intense throughout the exhibition. From this moment on, the artworks have thus been displayed in a radically different environment – an environment that is anything but neutral. This raises questions as to what such a colour scheme does to the works on view, and how it alters the viewer’s experience of the exhibition.

On 24 May 2019, a symposium was organised to contextualise this change. It asked what role wall colour, and colour more broadly, has had in the making of exhibitions, why certain colours are used more frequently than others, and how these questions relate to changing tastes, visual appetites and values attributed to art. In contrast to contemporary art, where they are rarely seen, exhibition walls painted various colours are often used to display old masters. Why then do museums, including the Frans Hals Museum, apply different exhibition strategies to artworks from different time periods? Departing from the question of how the use of colour has changed historically in the exhibition space, it examines how this connects to a broader visual economy and the entertainment industry museums are increasingly part of. Lastly, it raised the question of what kind of value judgments and belief systems are attached to something as innocent sounding as colour.

The event marks the beginning of a programme on Institutional Critique that will unfold at the Frans Hals Museum during 2019 and 2020. The practices of Institutional Critique are often described in terms of what they do, shifting the attention from the art object to reveal the infrastructures that support and contain it. White walls are the prototypical setting for contemporary art; they form the infrastructure through which we come to recognise art as art. While seemingly neutral, this white setting – also known as the white cube – is a carefully crafted, institutionalised space. It tells us that the things it holds are to be perceived as art, and hence looked at and valorised differently than when in the world outside.

In her influential book "Spaces of Experience, Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000," Charlotte Klonk establishes a link between the consumerism of the 1950s and the rise of the white cube as spearheaded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She concludes that the white cube was elected as the preferred exhibition interior because it was seen as the ideal environment to educate the tastes of its visitors. A skill – as it was argued by MoMA’s founding director – that could then be put to use in the budding consumer society of the time. Klonk thus points out that there is a nexus between art viewing and consumerism, one that has been actively supported by the white cube formula. If we bring this conclusion into the present, following Klonk, we might ask: how does the exhibition experience relate to the choreography of desire that is created in today’s attention economy? What role does the exhibition space and the way it is fashioned play in light of the current visual economy, as one that is increasingly characterised by online platforms and forms of consumerism in which images play an ever more important part?

With:
India Mahdavi, Designer, Architect, Colourist, Paris
Daniel Morgenthaler, Curator, Helmhaus Zürich, and Lynne Kouassi, Artist, Zürich, on their exhibition Of Colour (2019)
Charlotte Klonk, Professor of Art and New Media at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Author of "Spaces of Experience" (2009)
Jessica Stockholder, Artist, affiliated with the University of Chicago, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin Steven ten Thije, Research Curator, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Melanie Bühler, Curator Contemporary Art, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

The symposium is organised in cooperation with the Art History department / Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Centraal Museum Utrecht.

The symposium is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and Goethe-Institut Netherlands.

Programme
13:30-13:50 Welcome and Introduction by Melanie Bühler
13:50-14:20 Presentation by Charlotte Klonk Different Shades of White: Coloured Walls and the White Cube in Art Galleries at the beginning of the 20th Century, on the genealogy of the white cube
14:20-14:35 Response from Steven ten Thije to Charlotte Klonk, presenting an example of an exhibition in which colour was used as a tool to question the history of modern art
14:35-14:50 Break
14:50-15:20 Discussion with India Mahdavi about her practice as a colourist and designer, how she has worked with colours in different settings where art was present, and how colour and social media intersect
15:20-15:50 Presentation by Jessica Stockholder focused on colour in her artwork, and on the intersection between her work and context in relation to colour
15:50-16:05 Break
16:05-16:35 Presentation by Daniel Morgenthaler & Lynne Kouassi on their exhibition of Color that took place earlier this year at the Helmhaus Zürich, in which colours in the exhibition space were used as a lens to talk about questions of race
16:35-17:15 Panel Discussion with all the speakers, moderated by Laurie Cluitmans and Melanie Bühler
17:15-18:00 Drinks

Essay

Panel Discussion

In its Hal location on Haarlem’s Grote Markt, the refurbished Frans Hals Museum proudly presents the international group exhibition Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise (September 29, 2018–January 27, 2019). Frans Hals broke the representational conventions of portraiture. Reviving Hals’ actions against the protocols of his time, the exhibition brings together contemporary artworks that similarly play with, and speculate on, the notion of portraiture and its meaning today.

Frans Hals, Otherwise
The 17th century painter Frans Hals had a unique approach to portraiture. His paintings convey a painterly technique that was rougher, sketchier and freer than that of his contemporaries, suggesting an unprecedented sense of liveliness. Indeed, Hals’ innovation does not only pertain to the style of his paintings, but also to their content. As well as depicting wealthy members of society, Hals also introduced people of lower social standings into his portrait paintings—such as a gypsy girl, a person who was mentally ill, fisher children. With his innovative approach, Hals thus posed the question anew of who could become the subject of a portrait, and how they could be depicted.

Noise!
Taking these aspects of Hals’ work as points of departure, the exhibition Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise brings together contemporary artworks that similarly challenge the notion of portraiture. Across four chapters—Liveliness, Expectations, Infiltration and Noise—the relation of these works to topics such as representation, identity and agency within contemporary visual culture is developed, while the works themselves, along with selected works by Hals, grow progressively noisier. By drawing on caricature, irony and the grotesque, and by conjuring images both utopian and dystopian, these artists explore the formal, cultural and political possibilities of portraiture in our time, marked by deepening inequalities and a return to forcefully demarcated identities.

In an age of social media—with its profile pictures and selfies—the question as to how we visually represent ourselves is inherently bound to anything we say online. Speaking up, moreover, has become an imperative in today’s polarised climate, which demands we draw clear lines in the sand as we weaponise what we find most distinctive about ourselves. In this climate, the notions of identity and its representation have once again taken centre stage. Reflecting on this condition, the exhibition explores the possibilities and forms of portraiture that go against the grain of our time by questioning entrenched expectations, habits and assumptions.

Exhibition
For each chapter of the exhibition, a reproduction of a specific Frans Hals piece forms the point of departure. The presentation combines important works from the contemporary art collection of the Frans Hals Museum—by artists such as Sarah Lucas, Pilvi Takala and Gillian Wearing—with works by other contemporary artists.

The paintings by Nicole Eisenman, Justin John Greene and Jacqueline De Jong in the first part of the exhibition (Liveliness) relate to the sense of movement and animation Hals’ paintings convey, while translating it to social-utopian scenarios. Many of Hals’ group portraits are reminiscent of snapshots. Moving on from these animated works, the next section of the exhibition (Expectations) presents artworks that raise questions connected to issues of representation. Hals posed the question anew of who could become the subject of a portrait, and how they could be depicted. The works by artists such as Xinyi Cheng and Hamishi Farah relate to similar issues: who is allowed to represent whom and how? The next section, Infiltration, shows the work of Sarah Lucas, among others. Just as Hals, the artist added herself to a group portrait. While Hals allegedly painted his own image among Officers and Sergeants of the St George Civic Guard (1639), Lucas added her name to a group photo of the Arsenal Football Club. The exhibition culminates with Hals’ Shrovetide Revellers (approx. 1616-1617), the painting in which the kind of "noise" that Hals introduced into the genre of portraiture is probably best visible, as it combines a number of those elements of Hals’ painting that went against the grain of art at the time. This last part of the exhibition shows works by artists such as Kiki Kogelnik, Siebren Versteeg and Özgür Kar.

With:
Anna-Sophie Berger (Austria), Vittorio Brodmann (Switzerland), Xinyi Cheng (China), Stephan Dillemuth (Germany), Nicole Eisenman (USA), Hamishi Farah (Somalia), Justin John Greene (USA), Ivy Haldeman (USA), Tom Humphreys (Great Britain), Jacqueline De Jong (Netherlands), Özgür Kar (Turkey), Kiki Kogelnik (Austria), Sarah Lucas (Great Britain), Perri MacKenzie (Great Britain), Alan Michael (Great Britain), Jill Mulleady (Uruguay), Simphiwe Ndzube (Zambia), Josip Novosel (Croatia), HC Playner (Austria), Pilvi Takala (Finland), Siebren Versteeg (Netherlands) and Gillian Wearing (Great Britain).

The exhibition Noise! is curated by Melanie Bühler. This is her first exhibition since she assumed her function as contemporary art curator at the Frans Hals Museum. In 2016 the museum presented Inflected Objects #2 Circulation – Mise en Séance, an exhibition Bühler curated for the museum as a guest curator.

With
SADIE BENNING | MASSIMO GRIMALDI | CALLA HENKEL & MAX PITEGOFF | NINA KÖNNEMANN | ERIN JANE NELSON
15.06.2018 ‐ 07.10.2018

How do we experience the public sphere in a globalized, messy and digitally augmented world? And what does photography have to do with this experience?

This exhibition is the second in the series “Photography Today – Artistic Photography in the Digital Age”, initiated in 2016 at the Pinakothek der Moderne. It is concerned with the relationship between photographic images – both moving and still – and that which can be broadly labeled as “public:” the social sphere and its infrastructures. The Internet, social media and other digital technologies have changed not only photography but also the ways we think about and perceive public space. The artworks in “Private Public Relations” relate to this space while considering it from a personal point of view, through the medium of photography. Proximity and distance, intimacy and anonymity co-exist in these works as they grapple with an expanding social territory comprising the people we connect to on a global scale, the online and offline communities in which we live, and the institutions and platforms that define the rules by which we live together and engage with each other. In the age of Facebook and Instagram, all communications are bound to the profiles of individuals. The personal lingers on as a continuous subtext that shows up in the form of likes, emojis, and comments. Information in a social-media feed always relates back to an “I.” Given the new reality of personal-public relations and the powerful role photographs have played in its construction, many artists, who work with photography, are now looking at the world from a more personal perspective in an attempt to come to terms with the fragmented and polarized global social sphere. In the works of these artists, photography has taken a relational, social turn – one that is characterized by a subjective relationship to the image.

Edited by: Eva Wittocx, Ann Demeester, Peter Carpreau, Melanie Bühler, Xander Karskens
Contributions by: Mieke Bal, Melanie Bühler, Peter Carpreau, Bice Curiger, Penelope Curtis, Ann Demeester, Olga Fernández López, Hendrik Folkerts, Hanneke Grootenboer, María Íñigo Clavo, Xander Karskens, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Jean-Hubert Martin, Alexander Nagel, Ruth Noack, Nicola Setari, Jasper Sharp, Abigail Winograd, Eva Wittocx
Design: Sam de Groot

2018, Valiz with Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and M-Museum, Leuven | paperback | 224 pages | 23.5 cm x 16.5 cm | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-52-7

Since the turn of this century, we have witnessed a significant expanse in the field of transhistorical exhibition practices. A range of curatorial efforts have emerged in which objects and artefacts from various periods and art-historical and cultural contexts are combined in display, in an effort to question and expand traditional museological notions such as chronology, context, and category. Such experiments in transcending art-historical boundaries can potentially result in both fresh insights into the workings of entrenched historical presumptions and provide a space to reassess interpretations of individual objects in relation to their contexts and narratives.
Despite this surge of interest in art-historical writing and curatorial practices, and overview and theoretical mapping of transhistoricity has so far been missing. This anthology aims to fill this gap: it charts the territory for the transhistorical by bringing together contributions by leading scholars, curators, and museum professionals of the field. It looks at the concepts that undergird the transhistorical, describes the theoretical horizon it relates to, and illuminates the practical applications it has fostered. As such, it provides the grounds for further research and practical applications.
The book is divided into three parts: 1. Terminology & Theoretical Horizon; 2. Art & Time; 3. Curatorial Strategies.

Metropolis MInterview with Seth Price

Conference Day curated as part of the Rietveld Academy's Studium Generale program at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

How has contemporary Internet culture affected our emotional and cognitive capacities – our abilities to feel and think? Our minds, as Spinoza argued, operate first in the vague and blurry field of imagination. Here, feelings and thoughts converge before reason makes sense of them. This conference session that is titled after a book by Sianne Ngai, focuses on how networked culture can be perceived as an extended field of imagination – a sticky universe of emotions and ideas – and confronts the way in which digital platforms structure and organize this space.

Recent political developments, such as Brexit and the American presidential election, suggest that online culture has effectively created an environment of filter bubbles – affirmative echo chambers of like-minded people. Algorithms are the gatekeepers of these information streams with their very own agendas. Beyond these bubbles, it’s the surprising and emotionally potent that spread the most – the more outrageous the message, the more likely it is heard. If Google is knowledge, the brain that is picked the most, what does it mean when the search engine auto-completes the sentence ‘are Jews’ with the word ‘evil’ (as recently reported in the Guardian)? Has Google, with its self-proclaimed strategy of non-interference, actually paved the way for the normalization of prejudice, rendering the illegitimate legit?

Once a story or an image has nested itself within the popular imagination, it often doesn’t seem to matter if something turns out to be wrong. Apparently, then, feelings cannot be fought with facts. Accordingly, trolling and tweeting have become more effective strategies than official, less emotional and personalized modes of address. With fake news being spread and ‘alternative facts’ being promoted, anything is open for debate – it’s all just a matter of opinion. Has the kind of pluralism that Hal Foster diagnosed for the art of the ’80s (‘footloose in time, culture and metaphor’ – anything is permitted and nothing really means anything) become the reality of our information age?

What is happening to our brain – to the collective capacity to think, feel and imagine – in this setting? How do we think with and through the technologies that wire our brains together? How is truth afforded by technology and how does it intersect with the logic of a digital economy whose very currency – attention – is located in our brains? Where do the ugly feelings come from that have been harnessed so successfully in recent Internet-driven political debates? Have we entered a new age of propaganda, a new information era that radically retools the way we think and feel? What role does art and its related discourses (such as postmodernism and pluralism) play in this setting?

With:
Melanie Bühler, Hannah Barton, Jennifer Chan, Paul Feigelfeld, Daniel Keller, Elizabeth Orr, Özgür Kar and Timotheus Vermeulen

Catalogue Essay

Series of Lectures as part of the Master Photography at ECAL, Lausanne

Panel Discussion
As part of Paris Photo organized by the Fotomuseum Winterthur

Catalogue essay
As part of Photography Today: distant realities. An Exhibition Series on Artistic Photography in the Digital Age

Essay

With Nina Beier, Juliette Bonneviot, Nina Canell, Bea Fremderman, Rubén Grilo, Samara Scott, Jenna Sutela, Marianne Vierø

And thus nothing is left but these enormous movings around. Objects appear and disappear like fins of dolphins on the surface of the sea, and objectness gives way to sheer obsolescence. What is important is no longer the object, a concretion inherited from the codes, but metamorphosis, fluidity. Not a dolphin, but a trail, an energetic trace inscribed on the surface. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Energumen Capitalism’, 1977 )

In 1957, Roland Barthes wrote that “more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation […] it is ubiquity made visible […] less a thing than the trace of a movement.” Today, that ubiquity reaches to the center of our oceans, which are clogged with plastic. And as this plastic gradually breaks down into smaller particles it is swallowed by fish that we end up eating, which is to say, our waste is being fed back to us.

Materials and substances circulate once we dispose of them. They spill out, transform in unpredicted ways or find unexpected applications: birth control pills move through our bodies and into the water, dispersing hormones that can alter the sexes of fish; three-legged frogs emerge as a result of the complex interplay of a diminished ozone layer, agricultural pesticides and pharmaceutical residues; and plastic bags become prized for nest building by birds seeking increased status during courting rituals. Strange metabolisms and forms of re-use characterize the flows of materials as they move from being goods to becoming parts of bodies.

Recently, the term “circular economy” has surfaced for advocating a new way of thinking about the flow of materials. It refers to a logic in which goods are seen as containers for materials that are only temporarily consolidated and will be reclaimed as assets as soon as a product cycle ends. In this future scenario, the status of consumer objects will be one of constant transition. Liquid consumption will replace ownership and intermittent access will replace belonging under the pressure of the constant movement demanded by capitalism – a trend that is already foreshadowed by the current “sharing economy”. Goods are rented, loaned and leased rather than owned by the user; goods become services as their assets, the materials that they contain, need to stay ‘in the hands’ of the companies producing them. Accordingly, much of the work of managing materials within circular economic models will be comprised of surveilling the status of these distributed resources through networked technologies – a situation that raises questions about privacy, data management and growing energy consumption.

In the context of these changing models, the exhibition proposes an understanding of art objects as transient things, assemblages of materials whose destinies remain unknown, and as propositions for assimilation and disintegration. At a time in which the extraction of value from every available asset seems the dominant imperative, the artworks here display forms of waste, non-use and degradation.

Material is regarded as matter that goes beyond the categories of the living and the dead as it creates its own paths on which the organic and the inorganic meet. If control over our bodies is increasingly asserted through chemical substances, and if the movement of goods is subject to more and more surveillance, questions of ownership and access need to be re-thought when it comes to the matter constituting and surrounding our lives. In circular economic thinking, linearity needs to be replaced by circularity. However the exhibition acknowledges more complex forms of material flows: life cycles that cannot be predicted, and material currents that go wayward, run upstream, dry out or disassociate.

Nina Beier’s work Greens (€100) consists of a 100 Euro bill bath towel and a palm stalk and leaf being held together by a glass plate. Contrary to the work’s title, the plants have – since Beier made the work in 2013 – changed from chlorophyllous green to brown. The elements of the plant are exhibited and preserved by being pressed against a glass plate. This gesture of preservation reminds of the way precious plant specimens are preserved in herbarium books. By replacing the book sheets with a 100 Euro bill, the act of conservation is directly linked to value creation. More broadly, the sculpture alludes to the question how value is created and changes over time as well as where to locate this very value as the work literally hovers in an in-between state between image and object, representation and assemblage of consumer goods.

Juliette Bonneviot’s work series Xenoestrogens registers the movement and ubiquity of a specific material – the female hormone estrogen as it is utilized in the material world around us. The two sculptural objects that were commissioned for Otherwise, Unhinged consist of materials that contain estrogen: lead, cadmium, aluminum, aspirin, oestradiol, soy, pesticide and silicon rubber. Seemingly inert, these material aggregations complicate a too-easy distinction between the dead and the alive. They show that material flows, the matter that our objects and bodies are made of, are a shared concern of the organic and inorganic worlds and depend on one another. Industrially fabricated hormones have become ubiquitous. Xenoestrogens makes apparent that the substances we surround ourselves with and the bodies we inhabit make use of the same chemicals – they depend upon and influence each other in ways that often can neither be controlled nor predicted.

Nina Canell’s sculptures and installations materialize the intangible. The displayed works from the series Shedding Sheaths (2016) are found objects: discarded plastic casings that used to enclose fiber optic, subterranean cables employed to carry the data traffic for our digital communication. Once disposed, these remnants are collected in recycling facilities where they are compressed before being further processes and re-used for other purposes. They can be seen as the fatigued, material residues of the information age, the hidden, yet also circulating, moving and transitioning material infrastructure of our current digital times.

Hungry Bellies Have No Ears by Bea Fremderman is a sculptural triptych consisting of acrylic boxes held together with gold screws variously encasing gold electronic scrap, a gold bullion bar and a gold dental crown. The piece showcases different states of recycling: from obsolete technology back into the elemental state and then into a functional object again. It shows the versatility of a material and depending on its formal state the value one assigns ranges from useless, to valuable or functional. In Fremderman’s series Untitled (Clothes) sprouting chia seeds have taken over worn garments – socks, a pair of jeans, a hoodie – using these clothes as their breeding ground. Linking to the idea of how goods and materials can change over time, these artworks align themselves with the growth and decay of the sprouts they carry, hence introducing precarity and decay.

Mass-produced goods and their systems of production are a recurring interest in Rubén Grilo’s work. More specifically, his work centers on the distinct ways of materialization and how chance and error interfere with these standardized processes. For the exhibition Otherwise, Unhinged, he has devised Everfresh – a paint that never dries. Together with the German paint company Kremer he is launching this paint as an entire product line that can be bought through www.everfresh.online. As such, Grilo makes available the material condition for artworks that never set and never find a state of completion as well as launching an absurdist product that actively defies usability. Tamen Perez has used the paint in three, especially for the exhibition commissioned paintings.

Tamen Pérez’ paintings reflect on the current image culture that has long transgressed the medium she works in as they bring together symbols, logos and images that she found online with painterly gestures, washes, texts and drawings. This results in a potpourri of elements that is strangely whitewashed of a specific time, creating a kind of selective, anachronistic painterly afterimage of the visual overload that we are confronted with daily. For the exhibition, she has worked with Everfresh, Rubén Grilo’s paint that never dries further complicating and adding to the extended notion of time her paintings seem to allude to.

Jenna Sutela's written, installed and performed works seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments. Recently, she has been researching and working with slime molds. The slime mold, or physarum polycephalum, is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. For her work Orbs, exhibited in the basement of the exhibition space, a slime mold slowly extends on organisatorial charts of decentralized systems such as Blockchain (a decentralized database), Holacracy (a peer-to-peer organisatorial model) and a mandala drawn by the Japanese biologist Minakata Kumagusu that stands for a more spiritual, yet equally non-hierarchical world view. Sutela’s work then is an investigation into more fluid, transitional and circular organisatorial infrastructures showing how the most advanced cultural and technological theories harken back and are inspired by the stubborn growth of one of the oldest and most primitive forms of life.

Samara Scott has referred to her art as “trembling, putrid glitter.” And indeed, her sculptural works that are presented as a relational arrangement in the gallery’s basement consist of a wide range of contrasting and conflicting materials ranging from fluid to perishable, organic to mass-produced, featuring such things as white wine and nail polish, toothpaste and fabric softener, baking trays and bath salts. Sitting between beauty and decay, sparkling and rotting, visual celebration and heaps of trash, her work speaks of the lure and repulsion of a consumer culture in which just about everything can be bought.

Marianne Vierø’s work Great Transformation dramatically stages the fact that material properties can outgrow a work of art. Her sculpture is a 3D print of Naum Gabo’s Construction in Space: Two Cones (1927) one of the first artworks making use of the, then emerging, new material plastic. Her print is an exact copy of the work as she found it in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2013 in a state of collapse; it had imploded in 1968. Her meticulous re-creation pays homage to the history and decomposition of the piece. In making use of the state of the art printing technique, Vierø’s piece links to the history of material progress that Gabo’s sculpture somewhat ironically is connected to. It monumentalizes the history of how this specific work of art was handled, treated and temporarily fixed while further deteriorating, rather than keeping up the illusion of artworks as being timeless entities.

Dan Walwin’s commissioned work No title connects the previous exhibition Inflected Objects Circulation 2 Mise en Séance with the current exhibition at the Future Gallery. The video depicts three works in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum / De Hallen Haarlem that triggered the concept for the show at Future Gallery. In each of these works material properties took over interfering with the reality of these artworks, their value, aesthetics and ways to be shown. The video focuses on Frank van Hemert’s painting Seven (Two-Piece)) from 1991, whose paint started to get liquid again due to a production error in the paint after a period of 10 years. While waiting in the museum’s storage the paint slowly started to drip on the artworks placed in its vicinity. The second work is Antoine François Heijligers Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Ever since it came to the museum in 1950 it had white patches on – they became part of the work as the painting has never been shown and seen without them. The third series of works whose material properties seem to have taken over are diafanoramas from the 19th century – boxes with inserted glass plates depicting landscapes and seascapes. These glass works have been infected by a transmittable glass disease and now need to be kept in isolation from other works. As such the materialities in all of these works have the capacity to change the works, they are fluid and in a state of flux. Walwin’s installation documents these works in a way in which the known becomes alien – a feeling that is often evoked in this artwork. Working with camera effects that seem generic and repetitive he combines a very depersonalized way of recoding them with a low-key, amateurish approach filming them in extreme close-ups, with light reflections and distracting elements still in the frame.

Interview with New Scenario

Lecture

Lecture as part of the Master of Education Program

Lecture as part of Bots, Bodies, Beasts – The Art of Being Humble conference-festival

Chairing a series of talks and discussions
With Florian Cramer, Orit Gaat, Jonas Lund, Martijn Hendriks and Femke Herregraven

Essay
Anthology edited by Zachary Kaplan

Lecture as part of the series Medienkatastrophe

With Martijn Hendriks, Katja Novitskova, Vanessa Safavi, Dan Walwin

Pics or it didn’t happen – experiences turn into millions of images, moving through socio-technical networks and accumulating comments, views and likes.

Art is part of this economy of attention: in today’s hyper-networked era we are becoming used to seeing and experiencing artworks online. We encounter them as so many images in the various feeds we scroll through, our fingers touching the screen and our eyes quickly scanning its content.

Pics or it didn’t happen – the installation shot of an exhibition has become more important than the exhibition itself.

The exhibition Mise en Séance considers a different set of artworks: things that didn’t happen – objects that have been filed away in the storage space of Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. They might have had a moment once and have seen the instantaneous light of a digital camera when their picture was taken for the collection’s database, but for now they quietly rest on shelves, are carefully wrapped in boxes or stoically stand in a courtyard. They exist in a state of latency, awaiting their turn to be exhibited. They are not dead, but because they don’t circulate or participate in contemporary media culture’s circuits of visibility, they are also not fully alive. They could be seen as ghosts with a stubborn and decaying materiality that insists on its own objective reality: paint starts to drip, fungus to spread and colors to fade. They exist in their own secluded temporality: the time of the archive.

Mise en Séance stages an environment where artistic practices that are immersed in the logic of digital circulation encounter pieces of the collection of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem that, at first glance, seem radically detached from this logic. These objects were selected from the museum’s storage spaces and resume their place next to artworks that were created in response by Martijn Hendriks, Katja Novitskova, Vanessa Safavi and Dan Walwin. Without labels or any other explanations present in the exhibition space, the artworks have only each other to refer to and engage in a new set of relations. These relations of formal, conceptual and affective affinities are radically different from the logic of the museum that the objects usually report to: its collection and restoration policies and the art historical canon. What counts is what it is here now, the presence of these (art) objects in the exhibition space.

Henk Baard, director of the Frans Hals Museum from 1956 -1972 believed that candlelight could re-animate the 17th century paintings he exhibited. In the same spirit, Mise en Séance conjures a space of ghostly presence in which absent and present, old and new, and past and future merge. As such it investigates rules of circulation, conditions of vitality and the possibility of timeless appeal.

With Ché Zara Blomfield, Alessandro Ludovico, Yuri Pattison, Ami Clarke and Erica Scourti

Through readings and a panel discussion, the event addresses how publishing is affected by digitalisation and the distribution channels the internet provides, and will raise the question of how publishing can be understood as a process; as an expanded way of thinking that might permit us to consider more broadly current conditions in art production. As such it will particularly address text production through new technologies that test both the limits and co-evolution of humans and technology.

As part of Impakt Festival The Future of the Past

With Susanne Pfeffer, Lauren Boyle, Zachary Kaplan and Cécile B. Evans
In collaboration with Opening Times London

Recently, a number of initiatives have surfaced that are dedicated to presenting the work of artists in an online environment. Branching off into ‘the digital,’ institutions incorporate digital infrastructures as part of their institutional properties, launching digital residencies and giving away grants to support digital works. In collaboration with Opening Times, the Goethe-Institut London invites artists and organisations to discuss the question of how established formats of presenting art are translated into new digital settings and what consequences such a transition might have: How do artists create work in the setting of a digital residency and what are the concerns in presenting digital work? What are the material differences between on- and offline art spaces? Which distinctive norms and expectations are native to these spaces?

With:
Lauren Boyle, DIS Magazine, curator of the 9th Berlin Biennale 2016
Cécile B. Evans, artist, London
Zachary Kaplan, Assistant Director at Rhizome, New York
Susanne Pfeffer, Director Fridericianum, Kassel
Moderated by Filipa Ramos, Editor in Chief, art-agenda & Co-curator Vdrome

Opening Times will be present during the event through a take-over of the Goethe-Institut’s website, interacting live with the discussion.

Chair the panel discussion Boundless Digital Worlds as part of the symposium Sailing under False Colors. Transdisciplinary and Transgressive Practices in Contemporary Art organized by Medienwerk NWR
With Hans Bernhard, Cécile B. Evans, Paul Feigelfeld and Michelle Kasprzak

Lecture and Chair
With Karen Archey, Adam Cruces and Vivien Trommer

Essay

Catalogue Essay

Lecture as part of the Internetional Conference

Series of blog posts

With Philippe Decrauzat, Harm van den Dorpel, Katharina Fengler, Femke Herregraven, Lars Holdhus, Sophie Jung, Jenna Sutela

There is no such thing as a confined virtual domain. Computational processes can be traced everywhere and are deeply interwoven into the fabric of everyday routines. This results in a hybrid reality constituted by digital and physical infrastructures alike. As a result, artistic production that deals with questions related to digital culture has increasingly focused on objects, acknowledging the hybrid status of current digital culture and its embeddedness in a world of material things.

At the same time, the digital has become interwoven with the hyper-capitalist fabric of society: vast parts of the contemporary web are presently owned by a few private mega companies, which capitalize on the content and data generated by the users of their platforms. Data exchanged at a rapid pace is gathered, profiled and put to work, so that more products can be sold. Social media profiles have become commodities whose exchange value is measured in likes, social capital and ultimately sold for hard cash. Never have the logics of late capitalism been incorporated so intimately into our daily lives.

Linking this reality to artistic production, the digital can no longer be approached as a medium with distinct mechanisms and a specific aesthetic. “The digital” as such is hard to pin down. Still, if one wants to tackle the specificity of contemporary digital culture, it is characterized by an exceedingly complex technological and economic infrastructure that achieves high levels of abstraction. As more and more processes are digitized, the world is increasingly permeated by calculative, software-enabled infrastructures running silently in the background. As a result, we increasingly depend on these abstract processes that fly airplanes, switch on traffic lights, and determine the value of the money in bank accounts.

Digitization is based on a binary system, building up information on the basis of two symbols: zeros and ones. These fundamental bits then compose code, software, communication, images and social settings. Abstraction results in movement, dynamic, flow – a current that structures and forms what we see, buy and interact with.

The first exhibition in the series Inflected Objects, titled “Abstraction – Rising Automated Reasoning,” analyzes the relation between the increasingly abstracted technological and economic flows that structure our lives and influence the material objects produced. It investigates how abstracted, computational and economic processes leak in, mingle, underlie and structure physical materiality.

Employing a formal vocabulary that can be related to Russian Constructivism and Minimalism Philippe Decrauzat breaks from the rigid rules often connected to these art historical movements and creates a visually and spatially engaging environment. Philippe Decrauzat’s installation A Square, a black and white grid covering a large portion of the walls of the space, transforms the whole setting, turning the exhibition’s theme into a bodily experience and immerses the exhibited works in its abstracted language.

Both Harm van den Dorpel and Lars Holdhus have created installations that relate computational processes to art objects. Van den Dorpel makes use of algorithms to co-direct his work, outsourcing the choices to a self-evolving system able to foster new visual connections between the holdings of its database. Produced in situ at the Istituto Svizzero in Milano, Incompatibility Representation is made from various plastics and custom printed heat shrink foil, often used in packaging of disposable consumer goods. Hung in space in the form of a node-line system, it formally relates to structures such as: synapses of the brain, highways of automobile transportation, or even constellations of stars. The points of connection between one ‘reality’ or ‘currency’ of these structures do not fully touch, overlap, or transform into each another. While alluding to this incompatibility on a formal level, the installation materializes the collapse of different systems of encoding.

Lars Holdhus' three parts installation relates to how computers read visual information and process images. The artist has dissected the process of reading algorithmically a painting; he questions the human-machine-human interaction and the ways of looking at an artwork and re-producing that which is seen. Taking the forgotten oeuvre of artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven titled Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I by You (1923–24) as a starting point, he applied different techniques to mechanically decode it. Freytag-Loringhoven, to whom the first readymade is attributed to, lived a precarious life, never receiving the attention nor recognition that other male artists around her attained. Holdhus takes up her forgotten oeuvre and exposes it to a different kind of reading: that of computer vision. After having different computational techniques interpreting her work, Holdhus fed this information back into the medium of painting and a video.

How material objects and things relate to the economic substructure is what Femke Herregraven’s and Katharina Fengler’s works question. In Katharina Fengler’s paintings the relation between consumer object and abstraction is addressed by bringing together the lush, commercial photographic images of chocolate bars with the abstraction of airbrushed watercolor. Entitled Eddie Bernays after Sigmund Freud’s nephew (who was famously declared the inventor of modern PR in Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self) her series connects to how consumer products become objects of desire. While alluding to the notion of how an abstracted system fed by capitalism and informed by psychology creates, navigates and manipulates our cravings for things, the paintings become objects of desire in their own right.

Femke Herregraven’s work on the other hand, turns to probably one of the most opaque, automated and sped-up processes of the present moment: high-frequency trading. In her work, the Dutch artist gave the ultrafast financial transactions of computational trading a material form and physical presence. In the tradition of the tally sticks – ancient objects, such as bones and wooden sticks made to record value and transactions – the work Rogue Waves consists of a series of engraved metal sticks. They each carry the cut-out of a trading pattern connected to a specific event in which algorithms illegally manipulated financial markets through quote stuffing, spoofing gold prices and stock manipulation.

Pierre Lumineau’s text Rising Automated Reasoning is an interpretation of the exhibition’s theme and the works on view. His reduced language is informed by techniques such as auto-translate and Google queries. Employing these techniques, he willingly defers decisions to automated processes.

Chair Panel Discussion
With Kari Altmann, Bettina Speckmann and David Wightman

Introducing and chairing various Lunch Bytes Discussions at Foam, Amsterdam; CCA, Glasgow; ICA, London; Sinne, Helsinki; IMMA, Dublin; GL STRAND, Copenhagen; Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm

Essay

With Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Andrew Norman Wilson
Panel discussion during Art Salon, Art Basel

The emergence of the internet has transformed the context for art – its currents and networks. The circulation of images has intensified. Categories and labels differentiate the flattening and accelerating streams and feeds of Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr, where images accumulate visual capital through proliferation rather than scarcity. How do these logics of dissemination affect the production of contemporary art and how is value negotiated through these processes of distribution? Departing from this current situation, this panel investigates the relation between contemporary artistic production and commerce. How do artists engage with corporate models, branded identities and entrepreneurial tactics? What is the difference between the art commodity and the commodity in general? And what are the political horizons of intensifying rather than opposing technologies of commerce to redirect rather than resist platforms of capitalization?

Article

Catalogue Essay

Lecture as part of the Run Computer, Run Conference

With Kari Altmann, Florian Auer, David Jablonowski, Pierre Lumineau, Metahaven, Pamela Rosenkranz and Anne de Vries

Brands, consumer goods, and logos play an important role in the work of artists interested in internet culture. These artists comment on and celebrate the surfaces, visual regimes and aesthetic potentials of branded goods and work with the glossy shininess of brands, turn consumer goods into sculptures and rework, assemble and collect images of branded goods. BRANDS – CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY looks at this fascination and investigates the visual alliance between online culture and brands. It departs from the notion that images of branded commodities are powerful and attractive to work with because they express the most valuable characteristics of online image-sharing culture: they are instantly recognizable on a global scale, they implicate social relations, and they have affective qualities.

Like digital images, brands can exist in different, potentially infinite versions. They are reproduced through modularity, much in the same way as digital content evolves and gains popularity through modulation and adaptation. Their evolution is dependent on gaining visual capital, by being spread, liked and adapted. Like visual organisms they build a structure of references that is embedded in the DNA of the currently actual version of the image of the brand/good. Within this process, affect plays a key role as a relational force through which brands circulate and nestle themselves in our collective unconscious.

With the rise of the internet the context for art – its currents and networks – has changed. The circulation of images has intensified: categories and labels proliferate in the flattening and accelerating streams and feeds of Facebook and Tumblr, where images accumulate visual capital through shares and likes, regardless where the images are from, who has made them and for what purpose. As David Joselit writes “The emerging image is a dynamic form that arises out of circulation. As such, it is located on a spectrum between the absolute stasis of native site specificity on one hand, and the absolute freedom of neoliberal markets on the other.” This raises the question whether images of branded goods are so powerful for artists to work with because the neoliberal market strategies are already embedded in them. By building on the corporate images, which are carefully crafted to be successful on the market, artists are thus arguably intensifying the value of their own visual capital.

BRANDS - CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY investigates the parameters of this slippery terrain, with works that oscillate between adaptation and identification, celebration and perversion of branded imagery. Exhibited in the stasis of the exhibition space while building on the visual capital of branded goods, these objects and images manage to frieze, intensify, critique, and pay homage to the commercial cosmos they have departed from. If contemporary art is, as Hito Steyerl recently wrote “squarely placed in the neoliberal thick of things” this exhibition highlights and questions this position by examining how the visual language of our contemporary entrepreneurial consumer society impacts art making.

Metahaven’s “Silkroad: Nomadic Chess” can be seen as the backdrop of the exhibition. An extract of the work, which consists of 112 leather tiles in total, is shown in the space. In the form of a chess game, “Silkroad: Nomadic Chess” maps the internet by visualizing and materializing its socio-economic and ideological structure as a set of power relations between different actors and players. This monumental visualization of the online environment sets the stage and the context for the exhibition.

In her online contribution “Soft Brand Abstracts”, Kari Altmann investigates how brands mutate and shape their appearance. Much like visual organisms, they adapt and respond to changes and create new meanings and relations. By looking at brands, Altmann explores the status of the digital image and traces the evolution of visual content in today’s image culture. Her image essay “Soft Brand Abstracts: World Exposé” is part of this larger project. It specifically focuses on the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, looking at the branding strategies employed in the context of national representation.

The second work shown as part of the exhibition is an iteration of her project entitled “Ttoshibaa: 10,000 Impressions”, a visual feed on which she has been working since 2009, aggregating, accumulating, re-purposing and re-branding images. The coherence of this image archive is purposefully inexplicit – a meme that builds on a very personal image sensibility rather than a branding strategy that reveals itself as a clear concept. It thus complicates the legibility of memes and image feeds and questions the often overly present branding strategies used within the art world.

Pierre Lumineau’s work “Assets” shows the portraits of three of the most powerful internet companies’ CEOs: Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo; Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba, China’s biggest online auction house; and Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google. Introducing the faces of the CEOs as an interface with these companies, “Assets” provides an image that differs from the branding strategies the companies have chosen to represent themselves with. A poem that is part of the work develops a narrative around these figures by taking clues from the highly stylized business lingo used in their speeches and mixing it with fictional elements. Similar to the images, this results in a tension that oscillates between the personal and the corporate, the individual and the generic. This is further emphasized by what the artist calls a “dilettante use of the English language” the poem is written in.

Florian Auer’s work “Not Yet Titled (sky)” relates the branding strategy of the German media company Sky to a sculptural work of the artist. The company’s logo is conceptualized in a way that it adapts its visual identity to the background it relates to. The artist asked Sky’s marketing branch to apply this to one of his sculptural works, thereby branding and internalizing his sculpture into the Sky cosmos.

Anne de Vries, Pamela Rosenkranz and David Jablonowski are each represented with works that redirect the affective intensity of branded consumer goods by relating them to a new set of materials and hence add a different set of associations.

In Anne de Vries’ work, sneakers seem to have liquefied, multiplied and subsequently solidified into sculptures. These sculptures estrange and at the same time intensify the visual impact of the surface of this consumer product. Moreover, the work highlights the ease with which images are translated in different material aggregations in our current material and visual culture.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s work “I almost forgot that ASICS means Anima Sana in Corpore Sano” consists of a pair of ASICS sneakers, filled with skin-colored silicone. Placed in the room as if they have just been left behind, they relate to and question the interface between product and body, marketing and health, technology and evolution.

David Jablonowski’s sculptures materialize how knowledge is produced in our digital society. By layering and arranging both signifying objects as well the support structures these objects depend on, they draw attention to the materiality of complex informational nodes. With “Powerslave, Revolution Main (Signature Series)”, a pair of Vans become the centerpiece of an assemblage of objects, dissecting the Western view on the Arabic world.

Series of 23 discussions in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, London and Stockholm

Lunch Bytes was a series of public discussions, which examine the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital networked technologies in relation to artistic practice. Each event was dedicated to a different topic and brought together artists, media scholars, designers, curators and intellectuals.

The European series was a project by the Goethe-Institut in Northwestern Europe. The events referred to four major themes: Medium; Structures and Textures; Society; Life. The project culminated in an international symposium at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2015.

Lunch Bytes was curated by Melanie Bühler, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut and the following partner institutions: Foam (Amsterdam), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Checkpoint Helsinki, Frame Visual Art Finland, Sinne, Pixelache (Helsinki), Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (Kopenhagen), Arcadia Missa, Goldsmiths, University of London, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Royal Institute of Art, Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm).

Lecture at the Center for Advanced Media Studies

With Katharina Fengler, Rachel de Joode and Ida Lehtonen

Like you could touch it, like it was lit with skittles. It was about the poetry of surfaces. – Harmony Korine at the press conference for Spring Breakers at the Toronto Film Festival 2012

Today, the digital screen has become the predominant surface for engaging with visual content. The texture of the digital screen, characterized by its flat surface, artificial smoothness, juxtaposition of different windows, and chromatic backlit glow, constitutes the aesthetic framework in which we perceive and act upon a large part of the images we digest daily. Getting accustomed to its visual and haptic settings, we expect other surfaces and visual stimuli to appear and respond in a similar fashion. We have never been able to demand as much from a surface as we do in the age of digital screens. Having turned into intimate objects, screens have never been more responsive, more aligned with our needs, more flexible and addicting. Yet, at the same time, these beautiful things remain strangely alien, remote and detached in their closed-off technological perfection.

If digital surfaces are so ubiquitous, if we embrace them in such a powerful way, we need to question how they actually influence our visual culture. What are the aesthetic norms and affordances of the screens that we look at and touch continuously? How do they shape our perceptual and tactile conventions – also in situations that are not directly related to digital devices? This exhibition traces the impact of digital surfaces in the selected works of 3 artists – Katharina Fengler (1980, Germany), Ida Lehtonen (1986, Finland) and Rachel de Joode (1979, The Netherlands).

In Katharina Fengler’s paintings flatness dominates. On her large airbrushed works on paper fore- and background merge, while high and low contrast meet. Her paintings have an absolute presence, no before and after. The eye doesn’t know where to focus, how to zoom in or out, where to look first. Her paintings conjure the atemporality of the screen, the juxtaposition of disparate entities on one equalizing plane. This obstruction of perspective, in combination with a mesmerizing presence, also translates to her sculptural work. As if they fell from the paintings, these objects occupy space like alien things. Upon closer inspection, they reveal distinctly human marks, such as handprints, which complicate their smooth, Photoshop-like appeal.

Ida Lehtonen’s canvases display digital prints. In her collages, images are layered, merged and folded into each other, displaying frictions and traces that are entirely software-generated. Abstract landscapes with an almost painterly quality emerge. As if the screen had collapsed, these landscapes present us with a mush of patterns and glitches, laying bare textures that otherwise remain hidden by the smooth functionality of our interfaces. Placed in the exhibition space, it looks as if the contents of our computer screens, tablets and smartphones have spilled out and morphed onto hanging structures and objects.

Rachel de Joode's sculptures often play with expectations connected to specific materials and surfaces. In her work, digital images are given a material presence in the physical space of the gallery, which they nevertheless have to share with other objects. In the case of "Reclining Wet Clay On Greek Marble," a high-definition photograph of wet clay is mounted on top of a marble stone as a sculptural element, generating a sense of dissonance that addresses our habituated perception of each medium. For "Folded Skins," De Joode pasted together images of her skin to create a group of photographic sculptures. These sculptures are informed by the smooth and homogenizing effects of digital image-processing software, while simultaneously highlighting the uneven and porous textures of the human skin. The photo collage is printed on round, bean-shaped cut-outs, which are somewhat oddly grouped together. This further complicates their presence as objects constituted on the bleeding edges of the slick and the granular, the artificial and the organic, surface and depth, the screen and the gallery space.

Series of discussions, lectures and performances in Washington DC

Lunch Bytes examined the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the art world by addressing the role of the internet in artistic practice from a wide range of perspectives. The series consists of events, each dedicated to a different topic and bringing together artists, media scholars, designers, curators, and intellectuals.

Curated by Melanie Bühler, Lunch Bytes was initiated in 2011 by the Goethe-Institut Washington, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Pro Helvetia in Washington DC. Additionally, Lunch Bytes collaborated with Art Basel Miami Beach to organize the talk "New Media, New Markets: Buying, Selling and Collecting Digital Art" in Miami Beach as well as with the Kunsthalle Basel on the talk "On Releasing, Distributing and Exhibiting Art Online" as part of Art Basel's Art Salon Program 2013.