The Grand New group exhibition is on at Berlin’s Future Gallery, opening February 19 and running to April 2.
The gallery has recently moved from their space in Charlottenburg to a new location in Schöneberg, and is celebrating with an impressive line up of artists, including Emily Jones, Martin Kohout, Kareem Lotfy and Katja Novitskova.
Anne de Vries, THE OIL WE EAT (2014) @ Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam. Top-bottom ‘At Roquebrun’ (2014) and ‘Interface – Il Casolare’ (2014). Courtesy the gallery.
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Known for taking his audience to the darker corners of the internet, Jon Rafman unites with Christian Jankowski‘s interactive performances for Field Vision, running at Berlin’s Future Gallery from May 1 to June 13. The result is a series of travel experiences, where the focus is on the less dominant senses in an attempt to construct the surroundings of full-time web browsers based on photos from feed aggregator sites.
Shot entirely in black and white ‘The Eye of Dubai’ (2012) is the documentation of Jankowski’s first trip to the United Arab Emirates. Denying himself the privilege of sight, Jankowski and his film crew experience the entire journey blindfolded. Along with entertaining shots of the crew’s misfortune, the travelogue is stunningly visual. The architectural extremes of the region are shown, along with long nature shots that include one of Jankowski handling a falcon in the desert. A crew from BBC World News followed the process of producing the project, with one episode from the collaboration accompanying the film screened in the gallery’s hallway.
Jon Rafman, Field Vision (2015). Photo by Matthias Kolb. Courtesy Future Gallery, Berlin.
A pile of blindfolds lies on the floor of the main space. Above them hang large-scale photos sharing the title ‘The Eye of Dubai’ with Jankowski’s video and capturing amusing moments alongside the stunning surroundings. Rafman’s ‘YASIAOF (Chinese Medicine)’ (2015) and ‘YASIAOF (Woodsman)’ (2015) archival pigment prints are in the gallery’s main and left room. Printed on alu dibond and painted with dripping resin both images present a keyboard in the foreground covered in a distracting amount of trash. It’s a remake of similar images found on the web, accompanied by an oil paintings of a sunset over an Arcadian landscape.
A small boxlike enclosure called ‘Cubby’ (2015) after the children’s playset is one of two of Rafman’s DIY inspirited installations. Consisting of a mattress and a wooden box covered in pastel green-coloured PU chip foam, it acts as a home cinema allowing the viewer to lie back while watching a video custom-made for these surroundings. The film takes up almost the entire space of the inner room.
Jon Rafman, ‘Cabinet’ (2015). Photo by Matthias Kolb. Courtesy Future Gallery, Berlin.
The accompanying ‘Cabinet’ (2015) installation is another box-like structure made of the similarly crude materials as of ‘Cubby’, accessible through a door in the back. One person at a time can sit in a wooden seat with high sides and watch a video projected on one side.
‘Erysichthon’ (2015) screens in the small space an consists of photos from various feed aggregator sites, along with shots that seem taken from some kind of data storage. Often a hand holding a smartphone appears and is used as the video’s second screen, demonstrating the way many people browse the web in the belief that they are multi-tasking. That idea fits well with the video’s title, named after a cursed character in Greek mythology, who no matter how much he ate was never satisfied, eventually eating himself in hunger. **
Canadian artist and filmmaker Jon Rafman is returning to the homeland with a solo show at Montréal’s Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, titled HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL II and running from October 15 to November 22.
The internet explorer (and archiver) continues his examination of the shifting nature of self in the context of modern technology and virtual living, using video works, installations, sculptures, prints, and traditional painting techniques to probe the subjectivity of memory and the collapse between the virtual and ‘the real’.
As part of the exhibition, Rafman will show his latest series, titled Manifolds and coming out of the Greek-like sculptural busts distorted and altered according to the specifications of the modern world in his earlier series, New Age Demanded.
A mammoth survey of some of the world’s most influential emerging and established artists and collectives, Private Settings, Art after the Internet, is happening at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MOMAW), opening September 25 and running to January 6, 2015.
Curated by the Polish institute’s Natalia Sielewicz, the show press release reads like a search engine optimised article around the dominant art discourse of the last decade. Littered with tag words like “affect”, “authenticity” and “anonymity”; “prosumer”, “late capitalism” and “stock photographs”, the lineup is an equally expansive overview of some of the most relevant contemporary art of the day.
It’s another bold attempt at categorising the uncategorisable swell of artists rising from the milieu of online awareness, the same way that the Art Post-Internet exhibition in Beijing earlier this year did with its title’s integrated umbrella-term for ‘kind of a product of the internet but not entirely’ and more nebulous objective, spanning a broader generational cross-section.
Interestingly, the Private Settings sub-heading is identical to that of the Omar Kholeif-edited book You Are Here: Art After the Internet published in April. It’s unclear whether the reference is intended but there is some overlap with contributing artists also featured in the MOMAW exhibition, including Jon Rafman and Jesse Darling, perhaps revealing a consciousness for a shared experience, however incomprehensible that experience might be.
Examining information dissemination and the archive on and offline, Tabularium exists as a physical exhibition and a website. Curated by Alana Kushnir and taking its name from the 78 BCE Roman building storing tablet legal documents, it builds on the ongoing project collating and preserving publications not available in a digital format yet drawing from, or reflecting on the internet. The original Roman Tabularium was closed to the public but the works on show at Melbourne’s Slopes gallery examine the modern archive as a public resource, actively created, modified and consumed on a daily basis.
Slopes is a space that exists in a transitional state – sitting in the back of a building currently being renovated into apartments, it will close once these renovations are complete. Right now though, it’s a white cube punctuated by a ceiling open to a rickety-looking wooden catwalk and its designated ‘slope’ (a remnant of its previous use as an underground carpark) jutting into the gallery. It’s a perfect place to present Tabularium, where the remnants of a utilitarian past and pre-ordained non-gallery future mean that the space itself is positioned within the fluctuating lifecycle of the archive.
Tabularium (2014) @ Slopes exhibition view. Photo by Christo Crocker. Image courtesy Alana Kushnir.
The destruction of tactile documents, from the legendary burning of the Library of Alexandria to the recent loss of museum artefacts in Syria to civil war, are examples of how physical objects of knowledge and information can be lost, but the intangible online one is just as prone. Both Ry David Bradley’s ‘Flowers for Ukraine’ (2014) and Jon Rafman’s ‘Annals of Time Lost’ (2013) examine said extinction. Bradley inserts an abstracted flower into the Ukraine Wikipedia page, printing a copy to record the incursion. Presented along with a large-scale reproduction of the plant, its documentation continues to offer an IRL version of the page that exists long after editors have figuratively ‘deflowered’ the online one. Rafman’s video work, meanwhile, draws from the London’s National Gallery collection to produce juxtapositions of anime characters and old master paintings, building a new archive informed by the personal narratives of its creator.
The archive as physical property is examined within Lawrence Lek’s ‘Memory Palace’ (2014) video, taking its audience on a virtual tour of an imagined Tabularium space in which server racks and monitor screens take the place of inscribed tablets. Katja Novitskova’s knife-like ‘Shapeshifter X’ and ‘Shapeshifter V’ (2013), are made from circuit board wafers and presented within acrylic cases. The circuit boards do not disclose their originally intended use and any information encoded within them is lost. Instead, the museum aesthetic of their presentation prompts the audience to consider them as historical objects used in the distant past.
Other works, also including Tom Penney, Heman Chong and Anthony Marcellini, continue this exploration of documentation and archive construction. Eloïse Bonneviot’s ‘My Forensic Steps 2’ (2014) print on silk presents written instructions on the process of crime-scene documentation within the gallery, then subverts the objective output of those rules through a first-person game hosted on the Slopes gallery website. This subversion continues within Rachel De Joode’s print, ‘Hanging Marble’ (2014), rough marble reduced to two dimensions and exuding an oppositional strength and suppleness, a perfect representation of the way knowledge flows and changes within the archive.
Surrounded by these works in the gallery sits Tabularium Archive, a library of books on a server rack that capture the internet in some way, yet exist only within a physical reality. They’re digital ‘ghosts’ of texts from Kushnir’s personal collection, which fade in and out of view from within the space, reflecting on their status as information not available through online archives. Both the books and the works within Tabularium examine the spaces between the original Tabularium’s static information collection and storage, and the data flows of our current realities. Kushnir and the artists involved have built a modern Tabularium – an evolving space which sets nothing in stone. **
This is the first American solo museum exhibition for the Canadian artist, who will present a single channel video called Still Life (Betamale) – which excavates subcultural practices of the Deep or Invisible Web that contains most of the Internet’s content – alongside a selection of recent sculpture and photography from his New Age Demandedseries.
Apparently removed from YouTube as quickly as it went up this alternate video for Brooklyn producer Oneohtrix Point Never ‘Still Life (betamale)’ dropped yesterday and features a chilling indictment of the culture of enslavement to the LCD screen we’re all too conscious of. Artist Jon Rafman is responsible for this one and confirms a collective fear just by the huge reaction to it.
As said in an essay ‘Harry Burke w/ Metahaven: Metahaven, visibility and the joke’ in Arcadia Missa’s How 2 Sleep Faster #4: “jokes, when politically effective, perform what everybody knew but couldn’t say”. We won’t tell you what’s in the video itself but will warn you, it’s like looking into the eyes of Medusa (the nihilist’s intrepretation, obv).
Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven is out on Warp, September 30. **
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