Current Events

Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights

20. November 2025 – 3. May 2026
Group Show, Fundacion Telefonica, Madrid

A look at how our online practices leave a trace and shape our rights. Drawing on the Charter of Digital Rights (2021), the exhibition explores seven key areas with humour and everyday examples. Framed within the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónica and Domestic Data Streamers, the show encourages reflection and debate around the safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology.

We accept cookies as if they were freshly baked biscuits, without having the slightest idea of what ingredients they contain. We share photos of our children’s birthdays or family trips as if they were WhatsApp stickers, without knowing where they might end up. We use the same password for our bank account and our grocery app (spoiler: not a good idea). We check a website to see if it’s going to rain, only to give away our data like candy on Halloween.

The exhibition Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights seeks to raise awareness about the rights and duties that citizens exercise and develop in the digital sphere. Moreover, the show invites us to keep debating and building a system of guarantees around the digital ecosystem — a kind of ethical guide that helps us understand what digital rights and duties are, what they imply, and the opportunities the technological environment offers citizens.

Framed within the initiative of the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónicatogether with the artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers — which presents six installations —, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists such as United Visual Artists, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paolo Cirio, Noemí Iglesias Barrios, Theresa Reiwer, Hasan Elahi, and Aram Bartholl, among others. Their works challenge visitors, help them understand, and encourage reflection on our actions as digital beings. A much-needed exhibition, it fuels the debate around digital rights and duties, and calls for a safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology. Because today is a good day to discuss Digital Rights.

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Upcoming Events

Me and the Others

12. March – 13. September 2026
Group Show, Fondation EDF, Paris

By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.

Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.

Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.

With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas

Spazi di Transizione

9. – 11. December 2025
Talk, Spazio Murat, Bari

Recent Events

Scroll Panic Repeat

18. – 20. September 2025
Group Show, GOGBOT festival, Enschede

GOGBOT 2025
SCROLL PANIC REPEAT
18-21 september @ ENSCHEDE
festival for art music technology

Fundraiser: Gaza Biennale Berlin

13. September 2025
Group Show, Engeldamm 64, 10179 Berlin, Berlin

Fundraiser event I participated in:

“Join us on Saturday, September 13, 2025, 13–20h at Engeldamm 64, 10179 Berlin (Kreuzberg).

Solidarity Fundraiser for the
Gaza Biennale –- Berlin Pavilion
Works by 100+ Berlin artists
Each work €50

Over 120 Berlin-based artists have already donated works on paper in solidarity with colleagues in Palestine. The fundraiser will make the Berlin Pavilion possible: It will support the participating artists in Gaza by paying them artist fees, reproducing works that cannot leave Gaza under the siege, and expanding the ecosystem of the Biennale that allows the public to engage with their work.

If you are a Berlin-based artist and would like to contribute works on paper to the fundraiser, please email fundraising@gazabiennaleberlin.com for more information.”

Radio Spaetkauf panel

13. September 2025
Talk, Europäische Akademie Berlin, Berlin

Join us live-in-studio with season two of the Radio Spaetkauf x Europäische Akademie Berlin podcast collaboration. This year we focus on CULTURE. Each episode features fresh voices and perspectives representing a wide array of backgrounds, expertise and disciplines. Host Daniel Stern is joined by researchers, academics, independent artists, journalists and community leaders with unique insights into our evolving cultural interactions.

September 13th: Museums are more than just buildings that house objects. They are sites of memory, meaning, and power – spaces where stories are told, preserved, and sometimes contested. But who decides what’s worth keeping? And how do museums evolve in response to the cultures and technologies of their time?

As boundaries blur between archive and activism, exhibition and experience, we ask: What is a museum today? And what should it be? Together we explore the shifting roles of museums in shaping public understanding, identity, and imagination.

Guests include:

Michael Soltau – Synthesizer Museum Berlin
Aram Bartholl – Media and concept artist
Lilja-Ruben Vowe – PhD in cultural history, curator and inclusive mediator
Dr. Wenke Wegner – Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation

Host: Dan Stern

MINIMALE REVOLTE Festival

23. July 2025
Group Show, Public space, Charlottenburg, Berlin

The festival brings artistic short films into public space – presented in a mobile, seemingly improvised exhibition object: a transport cart with pneumatic tires, stacked with various boxes, crates and bags, all secured with colorful tension straps. Through peepholes in these containers, passersby can watch the films on hidden tablets or smartphones. The route leads through five locations in the district (Goslaer Platz, Mierendorffplatz, Österreichpark, Schustehruspark, Lietzenseepark). At each stop, the “mini-museum” stays for about one hour. The project is accompanied throughout the day by the two artists and curators Marian Luft and Moritz Frei, who will be present to assist and engage with the audience.

Curated by Marian Luft & Moritz Frei

With:
Iván Argote, Sophia Süßmilch, Björn Melhus, Hansol Kim, Barış Çavuşoğlu, Lorna Mills, Andrew Birk, Peng Li

pictures

Blog Archive for Category: exhibition-conference-lecture-event

KILL YOUR PHONE! at ‘Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics’ conference

November 22, 2025

I gave a talk and workshop at the annual conference of the “Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics” FU Sonderforschungsbereiche/ research cluster at HAU 2 Berlin, May 2025.

“KILL YOUR PHONE! is an open workshop format by the Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl. The workshop took place on May 10, 2025, during the annual conference »Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics« of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Intervening Arts at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, with conference participants and was documented by Aron Kühner and Bjarne Meisel.”

Mit Nähmaschinen, Garn und einem speziellen Stoff entsteht im Workshop ein tragbares Funkloch – in Form einer Handyhülle. Diese Hülle blockiert sämtliche Signale: kein Senden, kein Empfangen. So wird das Handy stillgestellt – es ist tot!

Aram Bartholl lädt ausdrücklich zum Nachmachen ein: mit Freund*innen, Nachbar*innen, in der Schule oder im Gemeindezentrum. Die stellt er auf seiner Website bereit.

Und so wurde die Idee im Workshop während der Jahrestagung umgesetzt:

Screenshot

Der Videobeitrag von Aron Kühner und Bjarne Meisel entstand im Rahmen des Forschungsmoduls »Postdigitale Interventionen«, welches im Sommersemester 2025 von Brigitte Weingart und Anja Dreschke an der Universität der Künste Berlin durchgeführt wurde.

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Intervening Arts Conference Berlin

June 19, 2025

Impressions from Jahrestagung 2025 | Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics
09.05.2025 – 10.05.2025

https://www.sfb-intervenierende-kuenste.de/en/veranstaltungen/jahrestagung2025.html

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Catalog: “Ihr Paket ist abholbereit”

January 6, 2025

ARAM BARTHOLL
Ihr Paket ist abholbereit
Kunsthalle Osnabrück
EDITOR Satdt Osnabrück, Kunsthalle Osnabrück
LANGUAGE German/English
FORMAT 21 × 30 cm
FEATURES 88 pages, 82 color images, softcover
ISBN978-3-95476-6680
RELEASE November 2024
PRICE € 28.00
Distanzverlag

 

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Double opening – HAW student shows

February 21, 2021

Posthumanism Explained, online exhibition, opening!! Tuesday 23.2. 18:00 -> https://posthumanism-explained.common.garden/ (computer browser recommended!) Results of the Blockseminar “Virtual Reality – Real Virtuality”, 3D and VR experiments, WiSe20/21, Prof. A.Bartholl, Kunst mit digitalen Medien, Design, DMI, HAW Hamburg.

with: Tobias Bartenschlager, Lukas Besenfelder, Stefano Dealessandri, Frederik Engelbrecht, Julika Hother, Vanessa Könemund, Katharina Mumme, Amyra Radwan, Sandy Richter, Luisa Striepe, Alexandra Vögtle & Sebastian Ziemann

The Danger Of A Single Story, online exhibition, opening!! 23.2. 18:00 -> https://the-danger-of-a-single-story.common.garden/ (computer browser recommended!) Projects on the topic of memorials and postcolonial discourse, results of the class “Denkmal”, WiSe20/21, Prof. A. Bartholl, Kunst mit digitalen Medien, Design, DMI, HAW Hamburg

with: Stefano Dealessandri, Konstantinas Grigalaitis, Stephan Kraus, Julia Löffler, Matasova Mariia, Sandy Rrichter, Janna Thaden, Anna Wank & Lorenz Wendt

Both exhibitions build with https://common.garden , thx!

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Swan Presence

October 23, 2020

A swan obsessed with Obsolete Presence. Picture by Simon Fischer: CC BY 2.0

Seasons of Mediaarts, ZKM Karlsruhe 2020

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“The Pool” – Documentation

October 20, 2020

This is a physical and metaphorical pool.

19. & 20.9.2020

THE POOL
Heybeliada – İstanbul

Curated by Ece Cangüden & Marian Luft

View documentation –> http://thepool.space/the-days-are-just-packed

with/ Accel Arcana, Adrian Altman, Albin Looström, Alessandro Nucci, Alexandra Koumantaki, Ana Castillo, Anastasia Bay, Andrew Rutherdale, Anna Slama & Marek Delong, Anna Walther, Aram Bartholl, Arthur Golyakov, Ben Sang, Berkin Gülten, Bernhard Holaschke, Bob Bickell-Knight, Bora Akıncıtürk, Buğra Erol, Botond Keresztesi, Cem Örgen, Christian Bär, Christian Kölbl, Christian Schellenberger, Clemens Reinecke, Daniel Peder Askeland, Don Elektro, Felix Amerbacher, Felix Thiele, Filippo de Marchi, Florian Birk, František Hanousek, George Jacotey, Naomi Gilon, Hanna Stiegeler, Hugo Laporte, Iain Ball, İlayda Tunca, Ivan Pérard, Jakub Hajek, Jakub Hošek, Jean-Damien Charmoille, Jennifer İpekel, NDRAP Development / Jens Ivar Kjetså, Jeronim Horvat, Jirka Pfahl, Joachim Coucke, Johanna Blank, Johanna Invrea, Julie Maurin, Julien Saudubray, Julius Heinemann, Julius Pristauz, Justin Ortiz, Kaan Ülgener, Karoline Schneider, Katya Quel Elizarova, Kerim Zapsu, Kid Xanthrax, Kıvılcım Güngörün, Korto Bojovic Amar, KOTZ, Leon Leube, Lucia Leuci, Maya Hottarek, Mert Diner, Undergroundflower, Merve İşeri, Michala Paludan, Michèle Pagel, Miguel Martin, Mikkel Carl, Naomi Gilon, Neckar Doll, Nicolas Pelzer, Nik Timková, Omsk Social Club, Oya Kalkavan, Özgür Can Taşcı, Paul Barsch, Paul Bowler, Peggy Pehl, Pınar Marul, Salvador Marino, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld, Sascha Mikloweit, Selver Yıldırım, Seyhan Musa, Şiir, Sirmon SR, Sophia Oppel, Ștefan Tănase, Steffen Zillig, Stine Deja, Süper Normal, Szilvia Bolla, Thea Mantwill, Tissue Hunter, Ute Richter, Vanya Venmer, Vilte Fuller, Vitaly Bezpalov, Vojtěch Hlaváček, Yein Lee, Zeynep Birced

In the swimming pool of the lost paradise that keeps its former glory alive by the wildness of weeds. We take you in from the lower entrance of the land, which is covered with iron bars. You climb up the ivy tunnel wrapped in rusty iron construction and reach into the realm of that anything and everything is true if you simply believe it to be true!
THE POOL sustains the future, where the dirty, deadly and almost lost one will be reproduced as a magnificent source of life.

THE DAYS ARE JUST PACKED

The physical manifestation of our online beings
As a fluid leaking out of the digital purgatory
We are spreading momentary existences
Ruins from today‘s prophecies
Just as stone tablets
Mutating in reverse

Dear post-social primates
You are the territory
Even if you are far
You can be close

Creations from a Polluted Lagoon: The Pool’s debut show on Heybeliada / Review by Matt Hanson on Exhibist.
https://exhibist.com/creations-from-a-polluted-lagoon-the-pools-debut-show-on-heybeliada/

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Obsolete Presence on Shutterstock

October 2, 2020

I m very pleased to announce that my work Obsolete Presence, currently on view at ZKM Karlsruhe has finally made it to the stock photo website Shutterstock. This is in particular interesting because I’ve been working with watermarked stock photo since a few years now. The circle has finally closed. :))

All pics tagged with Bartholl on Shutterstock here.

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Technology Off Screen

October 1, 2020


Aleksandra Domanovic talking about an original robot arm from Yugoslavia of the 70’s.

Vienna Contemporary

Sunday, 27 September 2020, 1:30-2:30 pm

ArtTech Talk: Technology Off Screen

Artists are increasingly using new techniques and materials that address our relationship to a technological world. Artist Aleksandra Domanovic emerged with work that directly addressed a screen context with her collaborative project vvork.com before establishing a largely sculptural practice that incorporates 3D printing and ideas around the use of technology and biological innovations. Aram Bartholl is a Berlin-based conceptual artist whose work unpicks the digital and the physical in inventive ways.

Speakers:
Aleksandra Domanovic, artist
Aram Bartholl, artist
Moderated by Francesca Gavin, art theorist, curator and writer

 

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Strike Now!!

September 4, 2019

Strike Now is a platform for discussion and exhibition about today’s working conditions in the so called ‘gig economy’. The rise of service oriented Internet companies like Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo etc created massive amounts app based self employment under often harsh conditions. Is this the new slavery of the post digital Internet commercial revolution? In which ways can workers counteract the algorithmic chains of start-up venture capital? With lectures, a panel and an exhibition Strike Now at panke.gallery will examine these and further questions.

A project by Aram Bartholl, funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds.

11. – 15. September 2019
panke.gallery, Berlin
Opening Sept. 12. 7 pm

14 SEP, 4:00 – 7:00 pm, Panel discussion

This panel brings togther three different perspectives on how the so called gig economy impacts working conditions around the globe. The participants focus ranges from artistic analysis and applied political research in the field to active union related work on the ground.

Participants: Joanna Bronowicka, Sebastian Schmieg, Akseli Aittomäki moderated by Aram Bartholl

Sebastian Schmieg is an artist who’s work engages with the algorithmic circulation of images, texts and bodies within contexts that blur the boundaries between human and software, individual and crowd, or labor and leisure. At the centre of his practice are playful interventions into found systems that explore hidden – and often absurd – aspects behind the glossy interfaces of our networked society. Schmieg works in a wide range of media such as video, website, installation, artist book, custom software and lecture performance.

Joanna Bronowicka is a sociologist and community organiser living in Berlin. She is researching the impact of technology on society at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Until recently, she was the director of the Centre for Internet and Human Rights. Joanna has been fighting for rights of women, workers and migrants for over a decade. She is a member of Polish left-wing party Razem which has an active branch in Berlin.

Akseli Aittomäki is a dance artist and experimental theater-maker. His works involve different productions, research and activism. His art practice ranges from experimental theater to contemporary dance and philosophically motivated performance works. Critics characterize his choreography productions as ‘essayistic’. Economic questions and political protest play an important role in his research. Aittomäki was a rider for Deliveroo for over two years. He was engaged in campaigns to improve the working conditions of the riders, such as protests, strikes, collaboration with media or providing help for workers after work accidents. Deliveroo pulling out of Germany is the moment for him to share his perspective.

Speed Show: FACE THE FACE

July 2, 2019

FACE THE FACE
A Speed Show on the Post-Digital Self

curated by
Anika Meier & Aram Bartholl
5.7.2019, 7:00 – 10:00pm
Internet Cafe – Midnightshop
Schönhauser Allee 188, Ecke Torstr., 10119 Berlin

Participating artists:
Lisette Appeldorn, Jeremy Bailey, Nadja Buttendorf, Petra Cortright, Constant Dullaart, Tom Galle, Lauren Huret, Johanna Jaskowska, Andy Kassier, Hanneke Klaver, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Echo Can Luo, Ines Marzat, Jillian Mayer, Andy Picci, Selam X

Social media algorithms have a preference for faces. People prefer friends to strangers and are more comfortable with the familiar in general. This preference applies to their own faces, too. Studies have shown that people like their mirror-reflected face most because that is how they are used to seeing themselves. “The selfie,” writes Nathan Jurgenson, “lets us share that mirror-view, what we see when contemplating our self, considering what we are.” Science is not yet convinced of what the critics are absolutely sure of: people who take selfies are narcissistic exhibitionists.

These days, when a person takes a photo to their plastic surgeon, it is of their own face. Smoothed and beautified by Snapchat and Instagram filters, it is the new ideal. Filters make people feel attractive. Masks and filters function as a barrier between the individual and the world, and people have always felt the need to change themselves by wearing makeup, getting plastic surgery, donning masks ,or using filters that simultaneously hide and reveal. Mask culture, thousands of years old, is currently undergoing a digital renaissance. Software-driven face-recognition apps on smartphones enable a new, shared experience of this ancient tradition. “The self one tries to express tends to be new, exciting, confessional, sexy, etc., because it plays as an advertisement. Identity is a series of ads for a product that doesn’t exist,” writes Rob Horning on digital identities.

In the early 1980s Lynn Hershman Leeson addressed the ways media changes the view of the self and promotes stereotypical norms in her series “Phantom Limbs.” Jeremy Bailey has been playing with floating, 3D objects in front of the camera since the early 2000s. The elaborate hardware and tracking programs he began with have now completely disappeared into the smartphone. Petra Cortright started using commercially-available webcam software with basic effects and folklore-inspired filters to create her series of YouTube portraits in 2009.

Now, a new generation of net artists is reflecting on the presentation of faces in the digital age. @AndyKassier, for example, explains in his video how to make the perfect selfie, while @jillianmayer gives tips on how to hide from surveillance cameras with makeup in her tutorial. @andypicci uses filters to criticise the desire for image cultivation in the era of social media and @johwska addresses the sort of beauty ideals promoted by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner every day. The @selamxstudio collective, in turn, shows what happens when a beauty AI does Kyle Jenner’s make-up.

http://speedshow.net/speed-show-face-the-face/

The SPEED SHOW exhibition series was conceived by artist Aram Bartholl in June 2010. The basic idea of this exhibition format is to create a gallery like opening situation for browser-based internet art in a public cyber cafe or internet shop for one night. The exhibition format is free and can be applied by anyone at any place.

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