When I first enter the room, I follow a small pathway, and my eyes struggle in the darkness. My senses are strained, but I can feel the vibrations of sound from a distance and begin to feel excited in anticipation of a new experience. A dim light emitted from afar assaults my eyes, but as […]
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025 took place at Osservatorio Prada, Milan between 23 November 2023 and 29 January 2024. The venue proved curiously appropriate for the exhibition conceived by artists and researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, engaging with a project about imperialism, control, time, politics, and technology in an intriguing, […]
In an attempt to understand different perspectives and voices on digital art in South Africa within a Global South/Majority World context, I interviewed transmedia artist Brooklyn J. Pakathi on 2 March 2023 via Zoom to hear their views on networked online curatorial practices and how these types of practices often diffuse the line between artist […]
The exhibition Liquid Spaces: Politics of the Screen, curated by Doreen A. Ríos for the Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial (BUAM) in Ecuador, delves into the dynamic nature of environments shaped by digital technologies. Underscoring the complexities of screen interfaces and their societal implications, Ríos explores the concept of ‘liquid spaces’, where boundaries blur and definitions remain elusive, reflecting perpetual change. Set within the Latin American context, the artworks address themes such as extractivism, surveillance, and technocapitalism. The exhibition features a diverse range of artworks, including painting and virtual reality, through which the relationship between the body and the screen is discussed, while highlighting audience engagement and interaction as integral components of the viewing experience. Drawing from her previous curatorial endeavors, in an interview with Annet Dekker, Ríos reflects on the transformative influence of screens on perceptions and realities, suggesting that screens serve as modern oracles and their users as potential shamans navigating the digital landscape.
How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity – the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others – help us reimagine and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself?[1] This is the question at the heart of the exhibition Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep, curated by Marianne Cloutier, Aleksandra Kaminska, and Alanna Thain, held at the […]
It is rare that an exhibition of contemporary visual art is so vigorously conceived as a reading exercise.[1] In Dora García’s She Has Many Names (M HKA Antwerp), curated by Joanna Zielińska, books are everywhere. Not only are writers such as James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, or Albert Camus subjects of García’s work, but writing and […]
In this interview, the Senior Curator of Photography and New Media at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter speaks with photographers and media artists Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag about their works commissioned for the New Visions triennial, presented at Henie Onstad in 2023. Vasylchenko and Virag explain how they work with contemporary image production and display technologies, such as synthetic aperture radar images and LED-screens and the perceptual politics associated with these technologies, as well as how they engage with organic materials as resources subject to extraction as well as material witnesses. The interview also addresses how the artists conceptually and practically tackle questions of image resolution and scale, and the artists’ extensive collaboration with scientific knowledge clusters and researchers.
Lives nowadays are saturated with online clicks, daily newsletters, social media updates, and a 24-hour cycle of news streams. The online world is vast and the wheels never stop turning. So how do you adopt the internet as a medium to a curatorial purpose? This is one of the questions curators Arianna Mercado and Yuji […]
An infinite exhibition fills the nave: Laurent Grasso’s ANIMA The world of analogies and meaning takes on its full scope, resonances prevail over impoverishing causality. Instead of being the sum of possessed objects, the world becomes the unity of all the spaces granted to the entities that populate it. – Grégory Quenet, curator of ANIMA […]
The exhibition Becoming Geological (25 November 2022 – 8 January 2023), curated by Martin Howse and Florian Weigl, maps several earthly trajectories by which the technologically destabilised Anthropocene is offered alternative futures, affirmatively. Situated in V2_ Lab for Unstable Media, a location which was founded as an artists’ initiative in 1981, and which has become […]
The thematic contents of the Berlin Biennale 12 and documenta 15, which both took place in Summer 2022, are certainly close, ‘focusing on themes of colonialism and decolonization … art as an opportunity to repair’[1] even though ‘documenta fifteen is practice and not theme based’,[2] its themes also follow decolonisation and demonstrating the continued presence […]
How does one win at photography? The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, London is a very good place to ask this question, since it hosts one of the world’s most prestigious photography competitions: the Deutsche Börse Prize, whose past winners include Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijsktra, Anna Gaskell, Juergen Teller, and Luc Delahaye. But it is precisely […]
In reviewing The Milk of Dreams, an enthusiastic Laura Raicovich summarises: The exhibition features mostly women and non-binary artists and engages deeply with notions of transformation and identity beyond the anthropocentric. Plants, animals, and machines are integral; the hybridity of these forms emphasizes inter-connectedness, solidarity networks, and alternate forms of knowledge production.[1] These few lines […]
In 2021, the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) opted for a hybrid format for its 24th edition (10-21 November 2021), but the real novelty was the appointment of a new director and a new programming team. I investigate the selection of this new team through the lens of the territory where the festival […]
With multidisciplinary collections dating from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, the Musée d’Orsay has regularly been integrating cinema into its permanent exhibition. Films, as works of art, are increasingly shown in its exhibitions, and film programming is a regular feature of the museum’s activities. The last major exhibition […]