Current Events

material messenger

29. June – 14. September 2025
Group Show, RAUM SCHROTH im Museum Wilhelm Morgner, Soest

English, ‘material’ is both a thing and a quality. The exhibition at RAUM SCHROTH presents international works and artistic concepts that focus on the material itself and explore its elementary nature, characteristics and behaviour.

These reflections include, in particular, possibilities of the material that run counter to customary uses, as well as surprising properties that the material does not usually display. The basic material is extremely diverse, ranging from solid substances that are also used to produce goods, to vegetable and ephemeral elements – the reference to the surrounding space, to change and transience is inextricably linked to the concept of material.

This opens up the broad field of meanings that are gained in the artistic transformation of the material and which in turn interweave it with existential, everyday and social experiences and concepts. material messenger is curated by Elisabeth Sonneck and Juliane Rogge. The exhibition includes works from the Schroth Collection and from invited artists:

Julieta Aranda | Aram Bartholl | Burghard | Angela de la Cruz | Spencer Finch | Abie Franklin & Daniel Hölzl | Jason Gringler | Carla Guagliardi | Vanessa Henn | Iepe | Zhanna Kadyrova | Katja Kottmann | Linda Lach | Jamie North | Anton Quiring | Ulrich Rückriem | Maarit Salolainen | Karin Sander | Nora Schattauer | David Semper | Berndnaut Smilde | Elisabeth Sonneck | Ignacio Uriarte | Christoph Weber | Beat Zoderer

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From Cosmos to Commons: Between Stars and Signals

21. June – 17. August 2025
Group Show, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg

Participating artists: Aram Bartholl, Zach Blas, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Charles & Ray Eames, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Timo Nasseri, Norbert Pape & Simon Speiser, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, Marie Pietsch, Agnieszka Polska, Jana Schumacher, Hoda Tawakol.

How do we navigate a world in which our actions have a planetary impact? In our post-global era, we cannot see ourselves merely as inhabitants of the Earth. Essentially, we are geological actors whose economic, ecological and political decisions leave profound marks on the globe. From this perspective, the Earth can be viewed as a dynamic system within a much larger cosmic structure.

The group exhibition Between Stars and Signals at the Kunsthaus Hamburg focuses on the bigger picture and spans an arc from humanity’s early understanding of the world and its orientation on the stars all the way to the planetary paradigm and modern technologies such as GPS. The participating artists have engaged in the topic of physical movement through space and time along with its philosophical and social implication. The works on view, spanning video, wall and spatial installations, reflect complex relationships between humans, nature and the cosmos – and make us think. For the question remains whether the digital transformation will lead to a deeper cosmic consciousness or whether it will distance us even further from our immediate experience of the world.

From the Cosmos to the Commons marks the beginning of the five-year programme conceived by City Curator Joanna Warsza. In 2025, it includes exhibitions at the Planetarium Hamburg, Stadtpark, the Kunsthaus Hamburg and a symposium at the Warburg Haus. Since 2024, the project City Curator Hamburg has been hosted by Kunsthaus Hamburg.

Curated by Anna Nowak

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Grand Snail Tour

26. September 2024 – 29. August 2025
Group Show, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Xanten Ruhrgebiet

What is the Ruhr area? An exciting metropolitan region centred around the major cities of Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg? Or a collection of scattered towns and villages from Alpen to Xanten? Or both? Does it consist of tranquil river landscapes along the Ruhr, Emscher and Lippe or is it hopelessly damaged by the scars of heavy industry? Ruhrpott, example of transformation, poverty zone – how can art open up, change and enrich this diverse region?

Urbane Künste Ruhr wants to find out and is launching the Grand Snail Tour in autumn, an artistic-performative journey through all 53 cities in the Ruhr region. Because this is an ambitious endeavour and Urbane Künste Ruhr has set itself the goal of getting to know local players, forming bonds and establishing sustainable networks, this is a three-year project.

Kick-off Grand Snail Tour in Xanten
Urbane Künste Ruhr is launching the Grand Snail Tour in autumn, an artistic-performative journey through all 53 cities in the Ruhr area. The kick-off event will take place on 26.9. in Xanten.

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Upcoming Events

Terms and Conditions

6. November 2025 – 3. February 2026
Group Show, Fundacion Telefonica, Madrid

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

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

Public Visions

14. – 26. July 2025
Group Show, BcmA, Berlin

This exhibition brings together models by artists whose works have been realized in public spaces across the world. These small-scale forms are not mere sketches; they were once proposals, prototypes, and poetic blueprints — early traces now translated into permanent works in the city.

with: Yasmin Alt, Aram Barthol, Jessica Buhlman, Moritz Frei, Gfeller Hellsgard, Andrea Pichl, Alona Rodeh, Andrea Zaumseil, Joshua Zielinski

curated by: Jay Gard

Recent Events

Chronically Online

25. June 2025
Talk, Online, Internet

Chronically Online – imagining an internet utopia

Chronically Online is a virtual residency for emerging artists who are deeply immersed in the digital world and explore themes related to the internet and social media. Participants will develop a concept into a presentable state or further develop an existing artwork for it to be exhibited at NPAK in Yerevan, Armenia.

Concept, realization and curation by Kimia Ghetmiri
Realization and curation by Namor Votilav
Institutional organizer: NPAK
Supported by HK-Art Gallery and Verein zur Förderung des Instituts für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte e.V.

 

Echokammer

20. – 22. June 2025
Group Show, Fasskeller, Berlin

mit: Aram Bartholl, Hannah Hallermann, Verena Issel, Anne Mundo, Finja Sander, Moritz Stumm / Stefan Neuberger,Philip Topolovac, Viron Erol Vert
kuratiert von Dirk Teschner

Der Ursprung des Begriffs Echokammer findet sich in der analogen Tontechnik als architektonischer Bestandteil eines Tonstudios und dient der Erzeugung oder Verstärkung des Halls. Ein starker Hall (Nachhall) entsteht mit acht oder mehr Sekunden in Kirchen. Echo ist ein verstärkter Nachhall mit darüber hinausgehenden Zeiten.

Außerhalb von Ton und Hall verweist der Begriff Echokammer auf einen Raum, in dem Aussagen verstärkt und Störgeräusche, etwa anders lautende Meinungen, geschluckt werden. Der Großteil der Menschen neigt dazu, sich mit Gleichgesinnten zu umgeben, um sich gegenseitig in einem geschlossenen Raum in der eigenen Position zu verstärken. In einer Echokammer rezipieren Mediennutzer hauptsächlich Informationen, die ihre eigenen Ansichten unterstützen. Mit Argumenten, die ihre Meinung in Frage stellen, setzen sie sich dagegen kaum auseinander. Dadurch entstehen geschlossene Netzwerke. Die Folge ist eine Verschärfung der politischen Debatte, ohne Hall ins fremde Tal. Die Suche nach einem gemeinsamen Klang kann aber nur außerhalb der engen Kammern gelingen.

Zuses Früchte

12. June – 10. July 2025
Group Show, Hofgrün, Berlin

Outdoor exhibition in the yard where Konrad Zuse did built his first computer.

with:  Aram Bartholl, Florian Bettsteller, Per Christian Brown, Freda Heyden, Mathias Hornung, Sebastian Kusenberg, Anna Luebben, Linou Meyer, Jason Reizner, Cyrill Tobias, Darko Velazquez

Hofgrün,
Methfesselstr. 10-12
10965 Berlin

Loops Series

22. May 2025
Talk, New Practice in Art and Technology, MA Design & Computation TU Berlin, Berlin

Loops is the public event series of New Practice in cooperation with the Berlin University Alliance exploring current questions facing our society at the intersection of art, science and technology in a unique discursive format. Afterwards, the Bar provides a space for exchange between guests, researchers, students and the public.

This session welcomes Aram Bartholl, a seminal voice in contemporary media art whose work interrogates the blurred threshold between digital systems and physical life. Merging conceptual art, hacker culture, and urban intervention, Bartholl’s installations and performances expose the hidden infrastructures of the internet while playfully reanimating digital symbols into everyday public space.

Blog Archive for Tag: map

‘Map’ at SMFMOMA

March 25, 2019

Map is being installed on the roof of SFMOMA for the upcoming ‘snap+share’ show. I made the first iteration of this piece in 2006, more than a decade ago—an epoch in Internet time. It is fascinating to see how much the context and meaning of this piece have changed over the years. Thirteen years wouldn’t usually be a huge timespan for a work of art to age, but in this particular case the speed of developments mean Map now looks very different. It has already become a historical work.

In 2004, Google bought Where 2 Technologies, a company that had worked on the digital map service that became Google Maps a year later. It was still the mid-early days of the web. The Internet was not as present in society as it is today, but tech giants like Google were already taking shape.

It was part of my practice back then to make such translations, to take an object from a computer game or an icon from a web service and to transform it into a physical sculpture. What would happen if I turned this 15-pixel computer icon into a real thing and put it in the city? Is this the center of the city? These and other projects were an attempt to understand how this new world of computers, networks, and screens would affect society and physical space. They were a sign of what was to come.

Today the situation is very different. We have the famous oligarchy of Internet tech giants who are constantly squeezing more data and money from every bit of communication, movement, and interaction everyone produces worldwide. They have expanded into all kinds of markets in a never-ending run of disruption with little objection or regulation from government. Today, data extraction markets are deeply woven into a very physical fabric of everyday life in cities, business, homes, and personal communication. The dualism of digital versus analog has been obliterated; everything is deeply interconnected.

Of course, it is an honor to show Map in such a prominent location at the SFMOMA in downtown San Francisco. But in a way, it is also an irony of history that this piece from 2006 is ‘coming home’ today to the heart of Silicon Valley in an era dominated by full-blown surveillance capitalism data markets.

Aram Bartoll

Map, 2019
dimensions: 900 x 530 x 20 cm
material: steel, aluminum mesh, steel cables

Thanks to the whole team at SFMOMA making this possible!!

SFMOMA: snap+share
transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks
March 30–August 4, 2019
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/snap/

curated by Clement Cheroux
with: Thomas Bachler, Ray Johnson, Aram Bartholl, On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Erik Kessels , Moyra Davey, William Larson, Jan Dibbets, Eva and Franco Mattes, Walker Evans, Peter Miller, Jeff Guess, Ken Ohara, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Stephen Shore, Kate Hollenbach, Endre Tót, David Horvitz, Corinne Vionnet


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SFMOMA: snap+share

March 23, 2019

Beautiful time-laps of the setup of ‘Map’ by Jason Wittig, thx! I arrived in SF and we are doing some the final touches on the show install. “snap+share” will open to the public Saturday, March 30. Looking fwd to meet all the artists for the preview next week!

SFMOMA: snap+share
transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks
March 30–August 4, 2019
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/snap/

curated by Clement Cheroux
with: Thomas Bachler, Ray Johnson, Aram Bartholl, On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Erik Kessels , Moyra Davey, William Larson, Jan Dibbets, Eva and Franco Mattes, Walker Evans, Peter Miller, Jeff Guess, Ken Ohara, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Stephen Shore, Kate Hollenbach, Endre Tót, David Horvitz, Corinne Vionnet

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NOTRE ITINÉRAIRE

August 3, 2014

tumblr_n72dsgBZ3H1taef36o6_1280

NOTRE ITINÉRAIRE

16 mai – 8 août 2014

With: Aram Bartholl, Cèsar Escudero Andaluz, Hassan Darsi, Manuel Fernandez, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Florent Lagrange, Simon Nicaise, Jean-Christophe Nourisson, Evan Roth, Vaan et Addie Wagenknecht.
Curated by Alexis Jakubowicz

at Espace Verney-Carron, Lyon

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The era ‘A’

June 19, 2014

google-map-pin-moma-recent

‘A’ for Art

In the summer of 2006 I built the first Google map pin physical representation and set it up temporarily in the backyard of my studio in Berlin Mitte. It was six meter tall and made from a wooden frame mounted with red cloth showing the capital ‘A’. The year 2006 was an important year in my early artistic career. I made a lot of new works and had my first big group shows etc. As it turns out the piece ‘Map’ became one of my important and iconic works. Since 2006 this sculpture  was shown worldwide in many different places, art shows and cities. It was made from different materials and in different sizes and it marked many different city centers around the world.
In 2005 Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen designed the map pin symbol for Google Maps which was launched later in the same year. The startup ‘Where 2’ co-founded by Rasmussen which in fact became Google Maps got acquired by Google the year earlier. To point out the locations of search results on the map the pin symbol showed letters of the alphabet. Starting with an ‘A’ through ‘J’ the red pins on the map corresponded with the first 10 search results listed on the page. A couple months ago in spring 2014 Google did a complete overhaul of the design of the Google Maps page. The red map marker does still exist in the new interface but it is displayed in more rare occasions and is only showing a black dot. The lettering A – J is gone. An era of almost 10 years of the Google Maps ‘A’ marker seemed to be over. But just recently in June 2014 the Architecture and Design department of the MoMA acquired the classic map pin symbol with capital ‘A’ from Google for its collection.
I am very pleased to see this symbol, made for a web page on the Internet by Rasmussen a decade ago is now in the collection of the MoMA. The red pin and its creator Rasmussen very much deserve this attention. This 35 pixel icon became a very important symbol for a whole new era. An era in which society slowly realized the actual impact of computers and Internet. The way we live, communicate and perceive the world has changed dramatically over the last 10-20 years. With my piece ‘Map’, the physical representation of Rasmussens interface symbol I try to point out this paradigm shift since 2006.
Aram Bartholl,  June 19, 2014
map_pizza3_1000
Screen shot Google Maps, Summer 2006. The developer back then proposed to seach for pizza.
map-pin-aram-bartholl-2006-berlin
First physical representation, ‘Map’ Summer 2006. Bartholl studio backyard, Borsigstr. 33, Berlin
recent-moma
Screen shot: MoMA website, recent acquisitions, Arch & Design, June 19 2014
google-maps-2014
Screen shot: Google Maps,  June 19, 2014, re-shaped map pin and no more ‘A’
 
 
 

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Here is Kassel!!

October 31, 2013


‘Hello World!’ at Kasseler Kunstverein, 2013

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‘Why do you film an A?’

September 23, 2012

map-at-gdfb-breda-2012 from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.

Map at GDFB

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Heavy Metal

September 19, 2012


Map at GDFB
(800 kg!)

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Rencontre Arles

June 22, 2011


I’ll be showing ‘Map’ at Rencontre Arles “From Here On” “beginning of July. Since the mayor didn t allow to have the piece for 3 months in the main square of Arles, France it was set up temporary and documented. The piece itself and the pictures will be in the show. Thx to Joachim Schmidt, all curators and team for making this possible!!
with:
adrian sauer, andreas schmidt, aram Bartholl, claudia sola, constant dullaart, corinne Vionnet,
cum*, david crawford, doug Rickard, ewoudt Boonstra, Frank schallmaier, gilbert hage, hans aarsman,
hermann Zschiegner, James howard, Jenny odell, Jens sundheim, John haddock, Jon Rafman,
Josh Poehlein, kurt caviezel, Laurence aëgerter, marco Bohr, martin crawl, mocksim, mishka henner,
monica haller, nancy Bean, Pavel maria smejkal, Penelope Umbrico, Roy arden, shion sono,
tony churnside et les get out clause, thomas mailaender, Viktoria Binschtok, Willem Popelier.
Pictures by Anne Foures, thx!!

clément cheroux, Joan Fontcuberta, erik kessels, martin Parr and Joachim schmid like to invite you
for the opening of the exhibition ‘From here on’ .
this exhibition is a major statement about artists and photographers who use the vernacular,
and any other images located on internet as the starting  point for their work.
By showing 36 artists we will try and give their work and this movement a new status.
the exhibition will take place from July 4 till september 18 at the Rencontres d’arles
international photofestival and is located at atelier de mécanique, 33 Boulevard Victor hugo, arles.
the opening will take place on monday July 4 at 11.30 am.

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‘Map’ in art

September 19, 2010


The latest print issue of art Oct.2010 includes  a short feature of ‘Map’ in Taipei.
Thx Alain!

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‘Map’ at Public Art Festival Taipei

August 27, 2010






Map at Good Time Public Art Festival’ Taipei, Taiwan, will be up for 3 months till November 2010. It came out very well! Great job! Thanks to the building crew and thx to Joanna from VERY for pics and organization. Thanks to Chang-Chih CHEN for the great pictures!

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