“Temporary Ferry” takes Wuhan—a “transit city” —as its conceptual starting point. Rooted in its geography as a crossroads connecting nine provinces, the city serves as a hub where the flow of people, goods, and information converges and radiates outward; the city, itself, is a vast temporary ferry. Drawing on this concept, the exhibition explores how people establish connections and preserve experiences in an increasingly fluid and uncertain present, while reexamining the significance of fleeting encounters. It does not seek to wallow in nostalgia, nor does it simplistically reduce mobility to migration and wandering. Instead, it views the “ferry landing” as a relational structure that is constantly being rebuilt: an adaptive wisdom that maintains order amid change and continuously generates renewal. Temporariness is not a flaw but a condition of its operation; it is only by engaging fully—even in the knowledge of transience—that truly meaningful encounters and exchanges are realized.
The exhibition consists of four non-linear sections, corresponding to four “moments of crossing” : generation, residence, sedimentation, and farewell. The first section, “Impromptu Pier,” focuses on lightweight, temporary, and mobile spatial structures. The constructions here do not seek to be sturdy or permanent, but rather engage in an ongoing dialogue with the environment; creators interpret space as a temporary interaction between the body and the site, establishing habitable temporary anchor points amid uncertainty. The emphasis lies not on the result but on the process— action is construction.
In the exhibition D’autres voix · langage · code · traduction (Other Voices · Language · Code · Translation), visitors encounter a multitude of languages, alphabets, and dialects, born or transformed by the generativity or virality of new technologies. These include the ones we invented: computer languages (Python, Java…), the creative and political stakes of Unicode characters, which give all our writing systems a common code, and even esoteric programming languages. Not to mention how AIs are trained to communicate, which is far from straightforward. Machines are learners, but they need supervision. There are also the modes of communication of non-human living beings, such as the scent of plants, whose signals scientists and technologists are trying to analyze by modeling them. And finally, the new modes of communication, built around images, that are emerging from the Internet and social media: memes, emojis, Italian brainrot…
With new technologies, the means (and therefore the ways) of communicating are multiplying. Translation is becoming a central condition of our experience of the world. To translate no longer means only to move from one language to another, but to navigate constantly between forms of expression. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” so much is our perception of reality shaped, in part, by the language we have at our disposal. The exhibition invites us to consider how, today, we are pushing back our own limits.
Artists Darsha Hewitt and Aram Bartholl transform the MÄCK Second second-hand store into an experimental laboratory for media archaeology and collective making through a series of workshops.The project takes the objects themselves as its starting point: discarded televisions, stereo systems, computers, furniture, and everyday items that tell stories of their previous lives while also carrying the potential for new futures.
Found objects from the MÄCK Second inventory are examined, modified, and recombined. Together, the participants develop a large-scale installation that reconfigures the store’s interior and transforms its inventory into an immersive landscape of sound, images, stories, and technological relics, accessible to the public during opening hours.
Situated between recycling, artistic research, and a speculative future workshop, the project creates a temporary space that invites visitors to explore the hidden potential of old things and to rediscover second-hand culture as a resource for new forms of living, making, and imagining together.
Im Panel „Digitale und transformative Materialien“ widmen wir uns gemeinsam den verschiedenen Facetten und Annäherungen an das thematische Feld. Paneldiskussion mit: Linn Schröder, Pierre Pané-Farré, Tobias Zielony und Aram Bartholl.
curated by Joana Moll
Das Panel bringt künstlerische, kuratorische und theoretische Perspektiven zusammen und diskutiert hybride Räume und die künstlerische Position als Orte der Übersetzung – zwischen Materialität und Code, zwischen Spiel und sozialem Raum, zwischen individueller Erfahrung und gemeinsamer Öffentlichkeit. Moderation: Nadine Kolodziey
Still Unstable – 45 Years of V2_
For 45 years, V2_ has been a space where artists, researchers and technologists come together to question, explore and experiment with emerging technologies. To mark this anniversary, V2_ presents Still Unstable: a programme of exhibitions, talks, interviews and live performances exploring the hidden systems that shape technological innovation today.
Rather than looking back, Still Unstable looks ahead. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, algorithms and digital infrastructures, the programme asks what remains unseen: the labour, resources, ecologies and power structures behind contemporary technologies, and how artistic practice can make these visible.
Exhibition
24 September – 18 October 2026
The exhibition brings together works by Rosa Menkman, Aram Bartholl, Anna Ehrenstein, knowbotiq, Kaisa Molga, Morehshin Allahyari and more to be announced. Through installations, moving image and artistic research, the participating artists examine the infrastructures, relationships and systems that underpin today’s technological landscape.
Unstable Talks & Interviews
24–26 September 2026
Alongside the exhibition, Still Unstable presents three days of talks, artist talks and interviews reflecting on 45 years of media art and the challenges of contemporary technological culture.
Confirmed speakers are Andreas Broeckmann, Annet Dekker, Aram Bartholl, Anna Ehrenstein & Yara Makawei, and Marijn Bril. Interviews feature Joost Rekveld, Joana Chicau, Gökay Atabekand Rosa Menkman.
We are made of memory, but memory itself is a fiction
The exhibition Self Storage investigates how individuals construct identity through personal and intimate recollections, as well as through the technical and social systems that shape their traces. Memory is not an objective recording: it is an assemblage, a selective construction built from both forgetting and persistence. A memory emerges within a space shaped by desire, loss, and reconstruction. Self Storage foregrounds this subjective and unstable dimension of remembering. Diaries, family archives, obsolete technologies, and bodily reminiscences become raw materials to examine the materiality of memory and its capacity for reinvention.
Hard drives, clouds, online profi les, and social networks are gradually replacing notebooks and photo albums. This massive externalization questions the boundary between private memory and public exposure, between lived traces and standardized data. Self Storage extends this inquiry into a contemporary era where identity is stored, outsourced, and endlessly duplicated. Through the works assembled, the exhibition off ers a poetic and critical drift between real and invented memory, intimate and externalized. It prompts us to consider: What do we need to retain? What do we choose to forget? And what becomes of the “self” when it is reduced to archives, content, and imprints?
curation : Nicolas de Chérisey & Philippine de Salaberry in collaboration with Ellia gallery
participating artists:
Joël Andrianomearisoa, Maxime Antony, Marcella Barceló, Aram Bartholl, Federica Belli, Matthias Bitzer, Borgial, Victor Boyer, Amélie Caussade, Salomé Chatriot, Coucou Bébé, Nick Coutsier, Fleur Cozic, Paul Créange, Corentin Darré, Oli Epp, Léonor Fini, Nan Goldin, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ryoji Ikeda, Victoire Inchauspé, Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Octave Lauret, Louis Lekien, Inès Longevial, Keegan Luttrell, Shiva Lynn Burgos, Matisse Mesnil, Sabine Mirlesse, Polina Osipova, Louise des Places, Joséphine de Rohan-Chabot, Philippine de Salaberry, Tehotu, Egon Thuile, Thu-Van Tran, Louis Verret, Francesco Vezzoli, Rose Vidal, Xolo Cuintle, Kai Yoda, Yugnat999.
3D-Scanning workshop with the painting class of HAZ
AFTER MEMORY reflects on how memory is affected by endless social media feeds, clouded storage spaces, automated data storage, and networked communication technologies. This bears both challenges and chances, as practices of remembering and forgetting are reconfigured and their competences are transferred from institutional actors to civic initiatives and individuals. In turn, the role of museums and archives is redefined, too, whose collections no longer preside over a sovereign narration of the past, but constitute shared repositories for the future.
With: Noor Abuarafeh, Heba Y. Amin, Maria Thereza Alves, Aram Bartholl, Taysir Batniji, Giselle Beiguelman, Zach Blas, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Ana Hupe, Eduardo Kac, Aline Motta, Rabih Mroué, Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger und Federico Protto.
AFTER MEMORY is a project by: Nathalia Lavigne, Lisa Deml, Víctor Fancelli Capdevila
Thx to whole curator and production team!
An exhibition of interactive artworks exploring contemporary sociality
Opening Night: 23rd April 2009 6-8pm, Exhibition Continues: 24th April – 30th May
Artists: Aram Bartholl, Cao Fei, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Paul Notzold and Thomson and Craighead
Curated by: Rachael Baum, Vivian Choi, Helena Copsey, Sue-Na Gay, Grace Zihua Lu and Sara Taylor
The University of Essex Gallery
www.sociallyactive.org.uk
pics by Rachael Baum
Finally I have a documentation for the tattoos online. Initially they served as flyers for the Friends project but since they are more than just a flyer I decided to document them on the “Are you social?” project page.
On top of that I published my first Instructable manual. Where to get and how to apply? It’s all here.
Have fun with them. I still have plenty. 😉
Thx to Veronika Becker for helping me out with the design.
Netherlands Media Art Institute formerly known as Montevideo in Amsterdam will show the “Are you social?” T-shirt in the upcoming exhibition “My [public] space”.
My [public] space
:: May 24 - June 21, 2008
:: Opening May 23, 5:00 p.m.
:: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam
with Aram Bartholl, Hasan Elahi, Martijn Engelbregt, Kota Ezawa, Dora García, Susan Härtig, Jill Magid, Eva and Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG, Eduardo Navas, Guy Ben-Ner, Marisa Olson.
The exhibition ‘My [public] space’ is a follow-up to the exhibition ‘Territorial Phantom’. In the previous exhibition the occupation of and claims to space by corporations, organizations or countries was central. My [public] space goes more deeply into the blurring of private and public information and spaces.
The copious use of digital, network and mobile technologies has had an enormous influence on our concept of public and private space, and calls up new questions about the conditions for these environments. Public space is not longer something that we can leave or exclude. Through wireless technologies chat, mail, GSM the public is everywhere: in our homes, our beds and even our bodies. What is private any more? What consequences does this muddying of the public and exposure to the public gaze have? Public space has become a hybrid: an entanglement of the public and private spheres…
read on at nimk.nl
The “Are you social?“-T-shirt is a co-production of Kosmar and myself. This piece has been shown for the first time at 2nd City Ars Electronica 07. More pictures and the complete project description can be found here.
I met Kosmar the first time at the plazes party in May2007 where I was performing the “Speech Bubble” project. Since then I kept following him on all kinds of social web platforms, especially twitter. I really learned a lot about social software and it is very interesting to keep up with this still vastly growing development on the web. Kosmar designed hundreds of social web micro buttons which everybody may use on his blog. I had the idea to design a T-shirt with these icons.