GAMESCENES

EVENT: GAME SOCIETY (MAY 12 - SEPTEMBER 10 2023, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA)

Game Society
May 12–September 10, 2023

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul
30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu
03062 Seoul
South Korea
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday 10am–6pm
Friday–Saturday 10am–9pm

Organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
Curated by Hong Leeji
Curatorial Assistant: Sojung Jang 
Technical support by Lee Giljae and Jiyoung Han

Artists: Cory Arcangel, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Jacky Connolly, Kim Heecheon, Lawrence Lek, Lu Yang, Ram Han

press release

Game Society is an exhibition that examines how the grammar and aesthetics of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture, and permeated our society and daily lives over the five decades since the launch of the first video game. Video games encompass interface design for visual and auditory stimulation, storytelling that spurs the imagination, immersive experiences and social interactions, which makes them the most relevant media form today. Game Society takes a closer look at the process of powerful synchronization between society and video games that has been accelerated by the pandemic. It explores the context in which society becomes virtual spaces and the reality of those spaces becoming part of everyday life, examining what experiences games can communicate and share with us. The exhibition features 9 video games and more than 30 artworks by contemporary artists who have been influenced by the grammar and aesthetics of video games. The games on display include Korean video games and select loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which have been acquiring games since the early 2010s.

To read is to imagine a world, to watch a movie is to observe that world, and to play a video game is to live in that world; the imagination and realism have become a shared experience and visual grammar in modern society. To play a game is analogous to contemplating and appreciating contemporary art in that it requires active participation in a work of art, during which the audience can attain a moment of art. However, the worlds within games are still imperfect. There is a marked lack of diversity in games, where virtual worlds are populated by hyperbolically perfect physiques, and women, the aged, weak, or disabled are either not represented or appear as non playable characters. As in real life, it can be difficult for them to find ways to access games and their digital environments. In contextualizing digital spaces and games in an exhibition, the MMCA, as a space of inclusion, proposes a reimagining of our society where gamification has become part of everyday life, examining gaps and empty spaces in games. In the end, presenting games in the museum is directly linked to the issue of the museum’s accessibility. Playing a video game is not different from viewing an art exhibition in that a video game’s tutorials resemble an exhibition guide with its set routes, exits, and entrances; the accumulation of experience and skill by playing a game resembles the increasing fluency and appreciation of art by visiting exhibitions and museums.    

All the video games in this exhibition are available for play. Audiences can play them with Gaming Accessibility Controller designed and developed by the Korea National Rehabilitation Center Assistive Technology Open Platform, along with Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller devices. As video game critic C. Thi Nguyen noted, games are “the art form of agency.” As such, the exhibition offers audience ways to gain fresh perspectives on the issues that emerge when they gamify their daily lives by providing universal and expansive controllers. In a similar spirit of inclusiveness and accessibility, the exhibition also provides online projects organized with PACK.

For the MMCA, this exhibition is a celebration of what video games and art museums share in their experiences. The exhibition is also an active endeavor to share the common act of accessing and reflecting on video games and the art museum, observing the roles and spheres of the individual and the public. In both video games and art, it is the application of contemporary knowledge and social experiences, and the speculation that it provokes, that creates an opportunity for us to reevaluate the world we live in. In this sense, the intention of Game Society is to provide the audience with the opportunity to contemplate and question the efforts and attention required to make public places and games more inclusive, reframing where we might wish to redefine our common goals. Through games as an artistic medium with cross-generational appeal, the exhibition hopes to provide the full sensory gamut to each individual in a unique way that serves the artistic experiences and values of each person best.

LINK: Game Society

EVENT: ART AND/OR GAME: SYMBIOSIS OR DISSONANCE? (MAY 16 - 20 2023, PARIS)

Post Growth Toolkit (The Game), Disnovation.org, 2020, game table of the installation, photo : iMAL, Bruxelles/Brussels

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance?

Centre Culturel Canadien

130 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris, France

16 May 2023 -> 20 May 2023

Curated by Lynn Hughes
Artist, independent curator and Emeritus Professor at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Assistant Curators
Nathalie Bachand
Independent curator and artistic co-director at Sporobole, Contemporary Art Centre (Ndakina/Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada)

Catherine Bédard
Curator and Deputy Director, Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris, France)

press release

Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance? is an exhibition that looks at some current practices in the very vibrant area where experimental games meet related art practices. Experimental games seek to resist the hegemony of the huge international digital games industry by presenting a profusion of local, personal and community-based alternatives that stretch the game form expressively and critically. 

The exhibition brings together a selection of artists and game designers from Canada and France with very different approaches to this interstitial space. The works range from the explicitly political and activist to those with more implicit and poetic integration of social critique, from the very figurative to the abstract, and from more traditional screen game formats to ones with physical interfaces of different types.

The game-work by the collective Disnovation.org is part of ISEA’s official programming. This project is funded by the European MASC-RISE programme under grant agreement n°101007915.

Visitors are invited to play on site with all the games presented in the exhibition.

Featured artists
Disnovation.org (France), ISEA2023 laureate artists collective
Ahreum Lee (Canada), Enric Llagostera (Canada), Raphaëll Maïwen (Canada), Santiago Tamayo Soler (Canada), Tatiana Vilela Dos Santos (France)

 

LINK: Art and/or Game: Symbiosis or Dissonance

EVEN: OPEN SYSTEMS 1_OPEN WORLDS (MAY 4 - AUGUST 10 2023, SINGAPORE, ONLINE)

Open Systems 1_Open Worlds
May 4–August 10, 2023

Curated by Duncan Bass

curatorial text

Press release

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) launches Open Systems (OS), its first dedicated initiative exploring technology and virtual spaces as sites for exhibition and art production, focused on the examination of the impacts of contemporary digital culture on creative expression. OS presents online exhibitions, interventions and virtual programmes where the sites of their production—video games, creative code, the browser—serve as the locus for both artistic expression and inquiry.

From May 4 to August 10, 2023, audiences are invited to reimagine the metaverse through Open Systems 1_Open Worlds (OS1) at opensystems.sg, a browser-based art experience exploring the dynamics between real and virtual realms. Bringing together artists and thinkers who imagine scenarios challenging logics of enclosure, privatisation, and artificial scarcity imposed on virtual realms, OS1 maps the inequities that transfer between lived and digital realms, positing that video games, game engines and virtual environments may function as sites to rehearse alternative and novel modes of social, political, and spatial organisation.

Unfolding across six thematic chapters fortnightly, the artworks presented in OS1 seek to reframe virtual spaces as sites for practicing alternative modes of organisation within society, from the shared reality of global financial systems and major cities to the multiplicity of personal interactions and individual expression. As the boundaries between real and virtual spaces continue to degrade—another opening of worlds—interventions in virtual realities increasingly reflect upon our physical realities, for worse and for better. OS1opens possibilities of reimagining our shared spaces, investigating a world that is no longer a niche pastime.

OS1.1_Virtual Capital Available 4–17 May 2023

Alice Bucknell, Lawrence Lek, and Bahar Noorizadeh, Rudá Babau & Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anna Palmer)

Through satirical storytelling and science-fiction narratives, Virtual Capital demonstrates how virtual cultures simultaneously reflect and react to tangible impacts on real, lived experiences.

OS1.2_WoW, Unite! Available 18–31 May 2023

Cat Bluemke, Joshua Citarella & Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, and Mario Mu

Exploring video games as unexpected sites for collective action and organisation, WoW, Unite! considers labour rights issues, exploitation, and organisational conditions in the video game industry.

OS1.3_Landscapes of the Political Imaginary Available 1–14 Jun 2023

Zheng Mahler, Shabtai Pinchevsky, and Firas Shehadeh

Through the concept of the nation-state as constructed by both physical environments and the collective imagination, viewers are invited to reassess their understanding of video games in Landscapes of the Political Imaginary and the underlying assumptions that are built into their virtual landscapes.

OS1.4_Unrealpolitik Available 15–28 Jun 2023

Yeyoon Avis Ann & George Chua, Grayson Earle, and Clemens von Wedemeyer

Focusing on the ubiquitous nature of violence in video games, Unrealpolitikunpacks the societal tensions and assumed neutrality of ideologies embedded in gaming software while highlighting the potential for intervention and political resistance in gamified environments.

OS1.5_Dematerialised Zones Available 29 Jun–12 Jul 2023

Antoine Chapon, Hayoun Kwon, and Total Refusal

Subverting stereotypical perceptions of violence often associated with video games by expanding on sites of conflict as liminal spaces, Dematerialised Zones illustrates how virtual spaces can serve as sites of healing.

OS1.6_Intimate Encounters Available 13–26 Jul 2023

Kara Güt, Sara Sadik, and Xáfier Yap

Intimate Encounters reflects on notions of nurturing one’s identity and intimacy within virtual spaces by drawing on old-school aesthetics, comparing character development in role-playing games to processes of personal identity construction.

A series of accompanying programmes featuring artists and collaborators titled OS Broadcasts will be hosted on the popular live-streaming platform, Twitch, and broadcasts of prior programmes can also be found on the Open Systems platform.

 

LINK: OPEN SYSTEMS

EVENT: MACHINE VIOLENCE (MAY 5 - 31 2023, NEW YORK)

MILTOS MANETAS, RGB, 1998, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in 101.6 x 121.9 cm (MM0001)

 

Machine Violence
May 5 - 31, 2023
Opening reception Friday, May 5
6 - 8pm  Postmasters 4 Bond Street, 10012, NYC

press release

Featured artists: Chando Ao, Damjansi, Huntrezz Janos, Gracelee Lawrence, Miltos Manetas, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw,Eddo Stern

Postmasters 5.0 is a moving target - our next exhibition will occupy a spectacular ground floor space on Bond Street in downtown Manhattan.

Machine Violence is a show for this moment, a visually stunning exhibition of topical relevance. It will bring together works in all media from software to painting.  Several historic projects by digital pioneers (McCoys, Matteses, Manetas) will be presented alongside current works of the new generation (Huntrezz, Damjanski).

Machine violence invariably fosters fear and disruption on an individual or societal scale. As artworks in this exhibition attest, it is left to humans - artists, in this case - to redirect, subvert, and/or transcend the literal narrative.

Fitting the current moment of intense uncertainty along the art-technology axis, this show can potentially triangulate two significant museum exhibitions currently on view in New York: Signals at MoMA and Refigured at The Whitney Museum.

The exhibition location, a former carpentry shop with skylights, brick walls and a 20 foot-tall ceiling, will be cleaned but otherwise left “as is” - raw - freeing the artists’ projections, screens, sculptures, prints and paintings from the homogeneity of a white box. Art can survive anywhere. Joining a salient history of co-opting raw spaces for art: Gavin Brown's Harlem space, Triple Candie, The Project, Sculpture Center - we will continue this countering flow at the moment of extreme showroom effect.

The exhibition centerpiece will be Horror Chase (2002) by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, who have worked collaboratively since early 2000 (Kevin McCoy is also widely recognized for creating the first art NFT in 2014). Newly remastered into 4K, Horror Chase is based on the climactic chase sequence from the film Evil Dead 2 re-enacted on a custom stage set. Each shot is digitized individually and processed by a custom computer program that selects clips randomly. The chase becomes a continuously variable incarnation of an endless - and futile - escape attempt. The images are projected on a cinematic scale, and the computer hardware is installed in a black briefcase which forms a part of the installation. Given the recent explosion of interest in generative art, the McCoy's piece may be one of the earliest examples of algorithmically created cinematic footage - a software/hardware combination of object and projection.

EVA AND FRANCO MATTES, Freedom, 2010, single-channel video(color, sound), monitor, inflatable mattress, cables, media player(optional), dimensions variable; running time: 8:56 mins, edition of 3 (#2/3), (EFM072)

 

Eva and Franco Mattes are the notorious Italian artist's team working with internet and digital media since the late 1990s. One of their most iconic works, Biennale.PY, Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine (2001-2003) is an aesthetically alluring, customized computer encased in plexiglass, with all parts exposed. It only has two software programs installed:  the virus that the artists made in 2001 for the Venice Biennale, and the "Norton Utilities" antivirus patch. The computer is in a perpetual mode of being infected, then disinfected, then rebooted; a machine locked forever in a fight between good and evil.

EDDO STERN, Vietnam Romance, 2003 digital video, NFT Time 19:09 (ES0018)

 

MILTOS MANETAS, Flames, 1997, digital video file, machinima, NFT, time 23:49, Edition of 3 (MM0002)

 

There will be three early key works of machinima in the show: Miltos Manetas’ Flames (1997) of Lara Croft committing suicide; Eddo Stern’s masterwork Vietnam Romance (2003) where key war scenes are recreated through video games like Grand Theft Auto and MASH; and Eva and Franco Mattes’ Freedom (2010), a haunting montage of death scenes from iconic first-person shooter games.

 

Damjanski will present his app, Bye, Bye Camera (2020), the AI-powered camera for the post-human era, which automatically removes people from any picture someone takes. The tool digitally detects and erases body shapes, but keeps human traces like shadows. The app will be shown along with photographic prints of Post Human Dog (2020),  his pandemic-time series of dogs with no owners.Gracelee Lawrence will present two large scale, 3D-printed sculptures of fragmented, battered bodies.

 

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw  are making a lamp, a huge, functioning, fruit flies - killing zapper encased in plexiglass.

 

Chando Ao’s kinetic sculpture in the show will be a computer driven chair/cradle for grownups that belies its mean and ominous torture device look, to soothingly rock the sitter.

 

Huntrezz Janos will show - as AR - two Instagram filters that recast the user as armored, warrior-like characters and a related 3-D printed sculpture.

 

Also on view will be Miltos Manetas still life paintings of computer components from 1998-2010. A mid-show performance is planned where Manetas will, via WhatsApp and a local assistant, paint a still life remotely from Bogotá.

 

LINK: MACHINE VIOLENCE

EVENT: HUIDI XIANG, WHEN HELD PROPERLY, (MARCH 31 - MAY 14 2023, BROOKLYN, NYC)

 

when held properly,

Huidi Xiang

March 31 - May 14, 2023​

Tutu Gallery

Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York City

 

Huidi Xiang's debut solo exhibition, aptly titled when held properly, offers a delightful exploration of video game aesthetics and pop culture references. Drawing inspiration from iconic titles such as Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, and Super Mario Bros, Xiang presents a series of colorful and conceptually engaging works that blur the lines between digital and physical realms. At the heart of the exhibition lies a playful homage to Super Mario Bros' infamous Shoe Goomba, as a green boot takes center stage in one of the exhibition's most visually striking pieces. Through Xiang's masterful use of color, texture, and form, the humble shoe is transformed into a vibrant symbol of pop culture iconography, inviting viewers to reflect on the social and cultural significance of video games and their enduring impact on contemporary art. April Z, Tutu's gallery curator, offers a profound and insightful analysis (see below) of the multiple layers of meaning present in the exhibited artworks.

 

​press release

Tutu Gallery announces sculptor Huidi Xiang’s first solo exhibition in New York: when held properly, opening Friday, March 31, 2023, with 6 new sculptures made this year tailored for the gallery’s home base. Charting the journey of her ongoing immigration and introspection on her role as a minority female in late capitalism, Huidi uses a mixture of symbols from video games and popular culture as her language to describe how affective labor metamorphoses into physical and internal harm by the larger system we exist under. 

This body of work was initially conceived from Huidi’s preoccupation with Shoe Goomba, a shoe-wearing, mushroom-shaped monster character in Super Mario Bros. A late addition to the game, Shoe Goomba can be defeated by the standard jump move, or, a stealth attack from below which then grants Mario possession of A Goomba’s Shoe (also known as The Shoe), allowing him to safely move through spiked grounds and monsters. Extended to real-life living in New York, putting on a good pair of shoes prompts a mental switch from nesting to facing the outside world, provides comfort on the go, and can even be used to deceive others about the wearer’s socio-economic class.

Huidi Xiang, when held properly, Tutu Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, installation shot (Courtesy of the Artist)

Huidi draws parallels between game simulation, animation, and immigrant assimilation as analogies for many survival strategies around the vicious cycle of personal caretaking, growth, and the eventual weaponization of a person. In power-up take-out, The Shoe, life-sized and spray-painted black, becomes the container for an enlarged, standing plastic knife, a normally frail gadget she cuts takeout food with in between busy work schedules, and, as she jokingly put it, perhaps the most powerful gear readily available for fighting. Such hidden anxiety about a lack of resources in an unfamiliar environment is further signaled by hold my inventory tight and right, a 4’ handmade woodcut board riskily balanced on a silicon banana peel, inspired by the inventory space design in Animal Crossing New Horizons. In order to start building tools which then build furniture and shelters on a deserted island, the player must rely on limited bag space to collect sticks and stones from scratch. A carrier like this, hopefully with a few things already in it, can also be swung to fend for oneself in unforeseen situations.

The multi-use of scarce assets encourages creativity, but also complexes the intention behind every simple act. Leaning against the wall, timbering the dream house embeds a small monitor framed in a shovel, displaying a video collage of Villager (originally a character from Animal Crossing)’s two Movesets in Super Smash Bros. Down special Timber shows the character shoveling to plant a seed, watering it until it becomes a tree, then peculiarly cutting the very tree he had grown in order for it to fall and hit the opponent; final smash Dream Home, he pays a team to build a house around the opponent proceeded by detonating it at the celebration of its completion. The gravity is my best frenemy, a life-sized concrete anvil on a silver chain placed above the mantelpiece, is drawn from props designed for Wile E. Coyote by ACME Corporation in Looney Tunes. A lucky charm to the artist, it enunciates the fanatic mindset that, to be considered worthy, even an instrument to produce weapons must be effective in attacks itself.

Such constant reexamination of straightforward utility, safeguarding merits, and concealed lethality maps an unavoidable disintegration of the singular self. In hare come the glitches, an axe, which can be used to chop wood and warm up the living space, or, to potentially harm domestic partners, merges into the Shoe and turns into the tail of Bugs Bunny, reflecting a disordered amalgamation of worlds, personalities, objects, and functions.

In the flower need no water, a chip-looking white lily in a glass jar pumps water into a basin sourced from Chinatown, which firmly stands on three triangulating concrete shoes, while a small plastic-watering-can-turned-into train loops around the rim. Modeled after Lily of Valley in Animal Crossing New Horizons, this white lily symbolizes the system’s promise of final recognition after one naturalizes by wearing the shoes, learning the language, gathering the resources, avoiding the dangers, making the work, knowing the right people and projecting the power. It is a perpetual motion machine: the water will come from the trophy in the shape of a delicate flower and take care of all things.

April Z, Tutu Gallery

 

Huidi Xiang (b. 1995. Chengdu, China) is a sculptor currently based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Huidi received her MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 and her BA in Architecture and Studio Art from Rice University in 2018. In her practice, Huidi makes sculptural objects, installations, and systems to examine world-making processes and the coexistence of multiple contexts and narratives in late capitalism. She uses her work to cultivate alternative narratives to speculate and investigate the usually invisible working mechanism, rules, and power structure hidden behind pop cultural symbols and scenarios. Huidi’s works have been exhibited internationally, including OCAT Biennale at OCT Art & Design Gallery, Shenzhen, China; KAJE in Brooklyn, NY, USA; Lydian Stater in Long Island City, NY, USA; LATITUDE Gallery in New York, NY, USA; Contemporary Calgary in Calgary, Canada; Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China; Miller ICA in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and more. Huidi has also participated in some artist residencies, including NARS Foundation International Residency Program (2022), ACRE Residency Program (2021), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2020), and Project Row Houses Summer Studios (2016). She is currently an AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

LINK: Huidi Xiang

LINK: when held properly, at Tutu Gallery

EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

EVENT: SARA SADIK'S XENON PALACE: CRYSTAL ZASTRUGA (FEBRUARY 22 - APRIL 28 2023, ROME)

Sara Sadik
Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga
February 22–April 28, 2023

Basement Roma
Viale Mazzini 128
00195 Rome
Tuesday–Friday
2:00 pm–6:30 pm

press release

Basement Roma is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy of the French artist Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga.

Born by a wide collaboration between public and private institutions, Sara Sadik’s exhibition will then move to the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, with a three-day performance (April 2023) before moving—with a second chapter of the show—to the Kunsthalle Lissabon at the end of June 2023.

Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga is a multimedia installation resembling a futuristic hookah lounge, a place far from the real world where the artist explores the magical dimension of childhood that takes shape in adulthood. Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga is a parallel and somewhat hallucinogenic world inhabited by fantastic smoky creatures, the Xenons, which appear from the fumes of hookahs. Through an immersive environment, packed with videos and sculptures, the exhibition takes us into the suspended dimension of Zetrei, the main character, played by Émile-Samory Fofana: a lonely man who has lost his family and friends, forced to live in a foreign, dystopian and alienated world, and that only by spending his days at Xenon Palace finds his haven of peace, capable of soothing the loneliness and sadness of his own existence.

“When speaking of Sara Sadik’s work, there is often talk of beurcore: in a sense, a reinvention of Afrofuturism based on the experiences and cultural references associated with the Maghrebin diasporas. But care should be taken not to reduce her work to an aestheticizing of urban cultures. This bias constantly threatens contemporary art by acting as a passageway between marginal or peripheral modes of life and the universe of commerce or publicity. How to pay justice to such work without tumbling into a descriptive exercise or a sociological explanation?” (Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Sara Sadik, CURA. 38, The Generational Issue, Spring-Summer 2022.)

Clearly focused on the themes of integration, identity, and marginalization in a still deeply discriminating society, Sara Sadik’s work features some of the central themes of social policies centered on institutionalized racism and its process of de-symbolization.

“The cultural and religious repression of the Islamophobic republic not only aims to exclude but also to foreclose any feeling of community conveyed by symbolism. This is the objective when the right-wing evokes so virulently and obscenely a Judaeo-Christian society: while the dominant benefit from a symbolic set of references, the oppressed are condemned to being stereotypes.” (Ibid.)

Halfway between fiction and documentary, everyday experiences, biography, video games, science fiction and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work creates initiatory stories in which young characters move eagerly within an identity process of physical and mental transformation.

Sara Sadik was born in 1994. She lives and works in Marseille. Recent exhibitions include Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (DE); Biennale de Lyon (FR); Crèvecœur, Paris (FR); CAC Brétigny (FR); Manifesta 13, Marseilles (FR). Her work is included in various institutional collections, including Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin / Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques. In 2023, Sara will be part of L’Almanach 23, Le Consortium, Dijon (FR).

LINK: Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga

 

EVENT: SØREN THILO FUNDER (FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 9 2023, ONLINE)

 

EVERYWHERE

Digital video/machinima (720 x 328), color, 11’ 33”, 2007, Denmark

Created by Søren Thilo Funder

In Everywhere, we witness a lone figure navigating through a bleak and surreal urban environment, evoking a sense of isolation and alienation. The desolate terrain appears to be both familiar and foreign, presenting a disorienting experience for the viewer. The man’ continuous movement and evasion of unseen obstacles within the virtual realm challenge conventional notions of escapism, offering a fresh perspective on the concept as an unending cycle of seeking liberation from an undefined void. The piece’s cyclical nature serves as a commentary on the paradoxical nature of escape, as the runner’s repetitive journey highlights the futility of attempting to break free from the inherent boundaries, constraints, and power dynamics of digital media. Through this haunting work, the artist invites us to reflect on the interplay between virtual and real-life experiences, and the inherent limits within the world of gaming.

An artist who specializes in video and installation, Søren Thilo Funder, creates thought-provoking works that blend various cultural tropes, socio-political issues, and popular fictions. These narrative constructions operate within a delicate membrane where fictions and realities intersect, generating fresh interpretations and new meanings. Funder's oeuvre is steeped in both written and unwritten histories, as well as a deep awareness of the paradoxes and complexities of societal engagement. His art explores temporal displacements, nonlinear storytelling, and the emergence of new, unconventional forms of memory. Through his work, Thilo Funder creates immersive spaces that enable unpredictable encounters with the political, temporal, and recollective. He invites the viewer to challenge their preconceptions and explore the unexpected, creating a dialogue that is both deeply personal and universally relevant. Funder received an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently finishing a Doctorate program in Artistic Research at The Art Academy, Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen in Norway.

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EVENT: REFIGURED (MARCH 3 - JULY 3 2023, NEW YORK)

Rachel Rossin, still from The Maw Of, 2022. Web-based animation with augmented reality (AR). Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website and Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art AP.2022.1. © Rachel Rossin

 

Refigured

Curated by Christiane Paul

March 3 - July 3 2023

Whitney Museum
of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014

press release

Refigured, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 3, brings together five installations by leading artists working in the field of digital art to reflect on the ways technology intersects with and influences our ever-evolving identities, underscoring the dynamic between digital and physical artworks and blurring boundaries between them.

Featured artists include American Artist, Morehshin Allahyari, Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey, and Rachel Rossin. Drawing from the Museum’s collection and including digital video and animation, virtual sculpture, and augmented reality, the installations in this exhibition respond to the various forces that form identity and engage with the concept of “refiguring.” Sculptures are presented concurrently in digital and physical space alongside animations that escape the confinement of screens and reach into the gallery. Constructs of identity, self-representation, structures of oppression, and colonialism are explored through a variety of lenses and mediums. Some artists investigate the ways identity is reflected in the structures of artificial intelligence and computer interfaces, while others consider how selfhood transforms in online environments and ancient cultural myths.

Refigured will be on view March 3–July 3, 2023 in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery, a space that is accessible to the public free of charge and often highlights the latest emerging talent and innovation in American art. Three works in the exhibition are also accessible on artport, the Museum’s portal dedicated to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art, and can be directly launched through a QR code. This exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Experimenting with the idea of ‘refiguring’ is at the core of the works presented in this exhibition,” says Paul. “Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them, the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”

“Under Christiane’s leadership, the Whitney has long been dedicated to building an important collection of digital art,” says Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “With Refigured we will shine a spotlight on this key area of our holdings and some of the most innovative artists working in the field today.”

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates video, installation, new media, and writing to consider Black labor, visibility, and antiblackness within digital systems and the internet. Their legal name change to American Artist represents the basis for their practice and affirms blackness as descriptive of an American artist while simultaneously erasing identity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” remains anonymous online. Mother of All Demos III, American Artist’s installation in Refigured, alludes to the historical underrepresentation of the Black workforce in Silicon Valley. The installation features a mold of an Apple II computer—the company’s last model with a black home screen—coated in dirt, with liquid seeping out of the keyboard and handprints stamped on each side. The physicality of the computer sharply contrasts with the sleekness of Silicon Valley, commenting on how ideologies influence design choices and digital interfaces.

Morehshin Allahyari’s hypertext narrative The Laughing Snake was commissioned for artport in 2018 and will be presented in-gallery as an installation including a sculptural component. The work is based on the myth of jinn, supernatural creatures from Arabian mythology, to explore the status of women and the female body in the Middle East. Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator whose work addresses the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. Employing technology as a theoretical toolset, the work documents and reflects on collective life struggles faced today.

A collaboration between artists Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :)))))) is a four-channel video installation centered on a chatbot examining the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. The chatbot was developed by Microsoft in 2016, and its

learning and language imitation were influenced by aggressive trolling on platforms like Twitter. Within hours, these influences led the chatbot to use genocidal, homophobic, misogynist, and racist language, and it was shut down. For the installation, the chatbot is resurrected as an avatar to reflect on life after AI death and contemplate the experience of being stuck inside a neural network and the “apophenic” pursuit of patterns within information and algorithms.

Debuting both online and in the exhibition, Auriea Harvey’s SITE1 is the latest commission for artport. SITE1 is an illusionistic online space and the origin site of sculptural characters the artist has been working on over the course of many years. This work will be on view alongside Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis), the virtual and physical sculptures that represent the “origin story” of Harvey’s online identity. The sculptures embody the artist’s virtual avatar and her working process, which combines clay sculptures, digital 3D modeling, and video game and software development. Harvey’s digital sculptures are the core of the work, and she sees the physical sculptures as an extension of the virtual pieces.

Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF, a recent commission for artport that launched in 2022, is a transmedia story that unfolds across multiple platforms and formats and reflects on the alterations our bodies and minds experience with technology. Rossin, a multidisciplinary artist and established pioneer in the field of VR, blends painting, sculpture, new media, gaming, and video to create digital landscapes that focus on entropy, embodiment, and the effects technology has on our psyche. This work investigates the relationship between humans and machines, highlighting technology’s evolution from a tool to an extension of the mind and body.

LINK: Refigured

EVENT: TO ANCESTRAL FUTURES (JANUARY 25- MARCH 12, GUYANCOURT, FRANCE)

To ancestral futures
From ancestral knowledge to digital
26th of January – 12 of March 2023
Exhibit space of Guyancourt
Opening on the 25th of January

Curated by Isabelle Arvers

press release

The global games market is still dominated by Europe, the United States and Japan.The exhibition “Aux futurs ancestraux” adopts a decolonial perspective on art and games in order to echo works conceived on the periphery of this global and globalizing culture. “Aux futurs ancestraux” immerses us in other types of representations, cities, landscapes, narratives and cosmogonies, conceived and expressed in other languages, and seeks to decolonize our imaginary through the co-construction of narratives born of the encounter between oral tradition, endogenous knowledge and the virtual universes of video games.

This necessary dialogue between these different modes of knowledge requires a paradigm shift. Science and human thought are no longer the only sources of knowledge; it is now possible to think of knowledge “beyond the human” (Eduardo Kohn). “This implies that nature thinks, that animals think, and that non-humans can teach us techniques and knowledge, by changing our perspective. (Viveiro de Castro).

Between photo installations, drawing, performance, video installations, immersive, interactive and video game, an exhibition that invites us to reconnect with what connects us to our ancestral futures: the living.

Artists line up

High in the Sky and Beneath the Stars, Laura Palavecino, (AR), interactive installation

Laidaxai, Daniela Fernandez, (AR) video game

Paramo, Eulalia De Valdenebro Cajiao, (CO), Installation drawings video

Water Divinity, Henri Tauliaut (Martinique), Video game

Atuel, Matajuegos, (ARG), Video game

Coca para comer, Aniara Rodado, (CO), Installation, Performance

Epiculus Garden, Tania Fraga, (BR), Video Installation

Infinitree, Mbaye Camara (SN) & Isabelle Arvers (FR), Machinima

Isabelle Arvers is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. She studies the artistic, ethical and critical implications of digital gaming, and explores the creative potential of video game piracy. As a curator, she focuses on video games as a medium for artists. In 2019, she is touring the world of art and games in non-Western countries to promote notions of gender and sexuality diversity, as well as geographic origin, focusing on queer, feminist and decolonial practices.

LINK: To Ancestral Futures