Current Events

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

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

Moving Image Perspectives

22. December 2024 – 30. June 2025
Solo Show, Annka Kultys Gallery, London

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is pleased to present Greetings From Germany! (2024), a single-channel video by German artist Aram Bartholl, a poignant critique of police activities on the streets of Berlin, underscoring the potential of art to confront and illuminate complex truths. This presentation is part of Illuminated: Moving Image Perspectives, the gallery digital programme, which will take place over the course of a year, and offer unique insights into new media artists using film, video animation, as well as their latest technological explorations, including blockchain and advanced technologies such as AI.

Aram Bartholl’s, video Greetings from Germany! (2024), uses the technology of AI as a space of opportunities to explore disturbing policies around modern urban policing. The ironic title belies a serious underlying message about police activity on the streets of Berlin — a reminder that art can be a powerful tool to consider truth more fully.

For this work Bartholl chose a single image from a recording of an anti-war demonstration in Berlin where police were involved. Using this single frame, Greetings from Germany! presents six alternative realities generated by different AI video systems. The unfolding events are unsettling, playing with notions of certainty. It is difficult to know precisely what is happening as figures morph into one another. Lines are blurred between police, demonstrators and bystanders and precisely what is happening – one figure appears to dance. As the video is shot from the point of view of the audience, (reminiscent of smartphone streaming), the work gives the impression of the viewer being a witness to events unfolding. This creates a sense of immediacy, yet questions of veracity soon arise. The use of a variety of video generators shows how each of these commercial AI models give a slightly different angle to the ambiguous narrative. Shockingly, however, in the final shot, the ambiguity disappears as the viewer is confronted by a distressing clip of found footage of the incident.

This work is about holding a mirror to society, making visible aspects of public policy that might be easily overlooked or disregarded. By using one of the major tools of contemporary society – AI, Bartholl here encourages the viewer to look again, reconsider definitions of what constitutes the real, and catalyse conversations around critical issues.

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

material messenger

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

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 berlin-based artist Elisabeth Sonneck and Juliane Rogge, curator at Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst (Conceptual Art Foundation). A programme of musical performances, lectures and talks is being planned to accompany the exhibition.

Recent Events

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.

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.

Jahrestagung Intervenierende Künste

9. – 10. May 2025
Talk, Hau 2, Berlin

Annual Conference 2025 | Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics
May 09, 2025 – May 10, 2025

Being online or not, there is no outside of “the digital”. The digital is always already inside us and dispersed throughout our everyday environments. Our bodies, infrastructures and politics are fundamentally intertwined with digital technologies and practices. The conference Digital Interventions investigates the potential of artistic practices that aim at either creating and safeguarding emancipatory spaces of the digital or challenging and countering the many forms of digital surveillance, exploitation and repression. Looking at the interstices between art, activism and hacking, the concrete materiality and embodied nature of the digital is analyzed as both the site and the means of digital interventions.
The term “digital interventions” itself is wrapped in fundamental and irresolvable contradictions. The digital sphere is a space of refuge and resistance as anonymity and privacy of communication provide shelter from oppressive violence. And yet, at the same time, the digital sphere is subject to massive surveillance, trolling and disinformation that capture and undermine political expression. With social media participation governed by the attention economy, the internet structured by platform capitalism, and political discourse undermined by algorithms – what are the practices and where are the breaches for artists and activists to intervene and challenge these developments? How can complicity be turned into criticality?
Focusing on bodies, infrastructures and politics we follow the hypothesis that it is a core task of the arts to make visible, critique and disentangle dysfunctional processes, false categories and ideological reductions as well as the complicity of platforms and online services with state power and the military-industrial complex.

It is organized by the working group “Digital Activism” in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

Programm:

Freitag, 9. Mai 2025
HAU 2
18:00 – 18.30 Begrüßung/Einführung
Sarah Reimann (HAU Hebbel am Ufer)
Karin Gludovatz (Sprecherin SFB 1512)
Simon Teune und Iryna Kovalenko (Tagungsorganisation SFB 1512)

18:30 – 19:45 Keynote
Aria Dean: Labor, Art, and the Vernacular Aesthetic Online
Introduction: Brigitte WeingartWechsel ins HAU 3

21:00 – 21:45 Performance
Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs)
21:45 – 22:30 Artist Talk mit Claudix VanesixFür den Besuch der Abendveranstaltung von Claudix Vanesix: Non-Fuckable Tokens (NFTs) ist der Kauf einer Eintrittskarte erforderlich.

Samstag, 10. Mai 2025
HAU 209:30 – 10.00 Einführung
Florian Schlittgen und Naomi Boyce (Tagungsorganisation SFB 1512)10:00 – 11:00 Keynote
Brigitte Weingart: The (Micro-)Politics of Meme Culture
Introduction: Matthias Warstat

11:00 – 11:15 Pause

11:15 – 12:30 Roundtable
Aram Bartholl, Jean Peters und Şirin Fulya Erensoy: Art Challenging Digital Repression
Facilitation: Simon Teune

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break and Workshop
Kill Your Phone mit Aram Bartholl (Workshop 1) ODER Shrink Your Files mit Matthias Grotkopp (Workshop 2)14:00 – 15:15 Roundtable
Pekka Kallioniemi und Muriel Fischer: Desinformation (and) War
Facilitation: Florian Schlittgen und Iryna Kovalenko

15:15 – 15:45 Pause

15:45 – 16:45 Lecture Performance
Azadeh Ganjeh: Not a Body for Burial
Introduction: Matthias Grotkopp16:45 – 17:00 Pause

17:00 – 18:00 Keynote
Joana Moll: Follow the Body: Materiality and Resistance in the Age of Data Extraction
Introduction: Matthias Grotkopp18:00 – 19:00 Abschlussdiskussion
Facilitation: Margarita Tsomou19:00 – 20:30 Pause (Abendessen nicht inklusive)

 

Critical Art vs. Prank Politics – creative tactics for post-moral paradigms

8. May 2025
Talk, hosted by V2 Lab, Online

Online-symposium, Thursday 8 May 2025, 15:00-17:30 CET, organized by Dani Ploeger

Contributors:
Aram Bartholl, Francis Hunger, Nora Nora O’Murchú, Dani Ploeger, Hito Steyerl, Florian Weigl

In February, Benjamin Netanyahu presented a gold plated pager device to Donald Trump, in reference of last year’s Mossad attack on suspected Hezbollah members, using explosive pagers. Not only did this gift mark another step in a seemingly escalating sequence of official glorifications of acts of state-sanctioned violence that are legally questionable at best (the United Nations Human Rights Office denounced the attack as a “terrifying violation of international law”). Its form also suggests that representatives of nation states in the Global North are shifting their previous focus on keeping up the appearances of an enlightened moral high-ground towards a strategy of prank-like utterances that blatantly display a politics of obscene violence that accompanies globalized power.

The hyperbolic representation and aestheticization of political transgression to expose the perverse implications and undercurrents of hegemonic power have long been a prominent tactic in critical art  practices. Now that this approach has been co-opted by the representatives of power themselves, thus normalizing the public display of violent excesses, what artistic and critical tactics – if any – might still have the potential to raise moral concerns and motivate resistance?

Critical Art vs. Prank Politics is a one-day online symposium organized by Dani Ploeger, Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Music and Theatre Munich in collaboration with  V2_Lab for the unstable media.

Blog Archive for Tag: random screen

Random Screen (v.3)

March 5, 2010

Short video docu on “Random Screen” v.3 2009  (finally HD)

Random Screen (v.3) from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.

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The art of art packaging

March 1, 2010


(Random Screen back from Korea … )

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Lack of electricity

October 22, 2009

electric_poster
I am showing Random Screen at
Lack of electricity
2009. 10.22(thu) – 11.19(thu)
OPENING 2009. 10.22(thu) PM 5:00

Venue:
Space CAN (46-26 Seongbuk dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea, 136-822)

Artists:
아람바톨Aram Bartholl,
헤르빅바이저Herwig Weiser,
박준범June-bum Park,
전병삼Byeong-sam Jeon,
정흥섭Heung-sup, Jung

[text below is raw OCR]

The media art works are focused on the miraculous techniques and astonishment as tt_e meaning of the works ratt_er
than the contents, with using of the digital technology, In other word, the audienceC participation of push ing buttons and
sensor detdion become accepted as an aesthetic communication , These situations intensifies the various aspects of
media art function,
A purpose of the exhibit_an, 4Lack af Electricity-Unplugged Media Art> is reinterpreting the media art and camplement
limitations of media art. This p0ject Degins with the question, ‘Where do we find the meaning of media art when the
electricity is out?”. since tt_e electricity is an indispensable element for the process of media art. Tt_ is project signifies the
mean_ng of electricity in med_a art,

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Random Screen at C.A.R.

June 8, 2009

rscreen-car1
Zeche Zollverein Mischanlage is a great space for exhibitions. Random Screen during C.A.R. last weekend.

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3some

May 10, 2009

Random Screen, Paper Pixels and On at “Springt!” Bremen from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.

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Kunstfrühling Bremen

May 7, 2009


I am showing Paper Pixels, Random Screen and On at Artspring Bremen 2009. An old 180x80m train garage space is filled with all galleries and museums of the region of Bremen, plus a group show ‘springt!’ curated by Dirck Möllmann.

Opening tonight! 7 pm
Güterbahnhof, Bremen, DE
open 7.-25.5.2009

Diana M. Alonso, Aram Bartholl, Norbert Bauer und Ralf Tekaat, Achim Bertenburg, Achim Bitter, Katja Blum, Susanne Bollenhagen, Reinhold Budde, Claudia Christoffel, Derk Claassen, Irmgard Dahms, Stefan Demming, Harald Falkenhagen, Christiane Fichtner, Max Frisinger, Anja Fußbach, Herwig Gillerke, Christian Haake, Jutta Haeckel, Margrét Rós Harõardóttir, Marikke Heinz-Hoek, Rosa Jaisli, Annika Kahrs, Hanswerner Kirschmann, Martin Koroscha, Korpys / Löffler, Sandra Kuhne, Ralf Küster, Patricia Lambertus, Susanne Laufer, Veronika Maier, Achim Manz, mark, Daniela Marschall, Jub Mönster, Horst Müller, Cordula Prieser, Ina Raschke, Talal Refit, Felix Rehfeld, Preechaya Siripanich, Anna Solecka, Marina Steinacker und Susanne Katharina Willand, Kinki Texas, Mei-Shiu Winde-Liu, Christian Wolter

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“Random Screen” at 5 minute museum

February 13, 2009


I’ll be showing Random Screen at

5 minute museum
Eindhoven, NL
March 5th – 21st 2009

5 Minute Museum initiated by STRP and art space MU is a special project room in the heart of Strijp S a former Philips factory location in Eindhoven that is being transformed into a cultural hub. At the moment industry has just left the site (leaving mostly gigantic monumental factory complexes empty) and young designers and artists are taking over. In this phase STRP and MU initiated the plan to begin a new museum concept that focuses on just one work every month that gets a space of its own of about a 70 square meters. Visitors must be able to experience this work in the most direct and individual way possible, being able to be grasped by it for at least 5 minutes or more.

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“Random Screen” at Lab30

October 22, 2007


I will show Random Screen including a build your own pixel workshop at the media art festival

Lab30 Augsburg, DE.
25.-27.10.2007

The program looks quite promising.

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Pic of theday: Random Screen Color!

May 9, 2007


Michael took this picture of this wonderful color changing pixel clock. Very nice combination of analogue and digital. But it says LED, no tea candles in there, thats for sure.
Thx Michael!

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Press: Bauwelt on Transmediale, Random Screen and Second Life

April 27, 2007


Bauwelt is the weekly german standard in architecture. Thanks to Matthias Böttger who wrote this article about the Transmediale07 talking about my piece “Random Screen” and the Second Life panel I was on.

Bauwelt 17/2007 Page 4

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