Laufende Termine

Are we there yet?

14. February – 16. May 2025
Gruppenausstellung, Nome gallery, Berlin

NOME is pleased to announce are we there yet?, a group exhibition that critically examines issues of police brutality, mass incarceration, discrimination, immigration, and state surveillance. The show draws its title from a work by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, whose aphoristic text-based practice often grapples with complex societal questions. As with many of her works, are we there yet? carries multiple meanings, symbolizing both a push for equality and the darker undercurrents of state violence. The exhibition invokes Rasheed’s question to probe the spread of authoritarianism in contemporary society.

Artists: Camae Ayewa, Sadie Barnette, Aram Bartholl, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, James Bridle, Paolo Cirio, Cian Dayrit, Priscilla Dobler Dzul, Navine G. Dossos, Igor Grubić, Kite, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Voluspa Jarpa, Ahmet Öğüt, Dread Scott, Myriam Zarhloul

Moving Image Perspectives

22. December 2024 – 30. June 2025
Einzelausstellung, 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
Gruppenausstellung, 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.

Instruments of Surveillance

21. September 2024 – 2. May 2025
Gruppenausstellung, National Communications Museum, Hawthorn, Melbourne

As the race to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) accelerates, questions of surveillance are more important than ever. Is it human or machine? And how can people equip themselves with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate technological futures?

Instruments of Surveillance grounds an age-old and contentious topic in the human and the everyday. From government spooks, data-extraction and activism through to generative AI, this exhibition unravels the interface between human and machine, inviting audiences to unpack the technologies that people use to surveil and their role in it.

Interact with a robotic commission by Louis-Philippe Demers. See an original WWII Enigma Machine, along with wiretaps and prototypes from the Australian Federal Police. Engage with commissions by Leah Heiss and Emma Luke, Kate Crawford, Aram Bartholl and Weniki Hensch among others.

This exhibition is curated by Jemimah Widdicombe (NCM) in collaboration with Dr. Tyne Sumner, current ARC DECRA fellow at the Australian National University.

Bilder

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Kommende Termine

Jahrestagung Intervenierende Künste

9. – 10. May 2025
Talk, Hau 2, Berlin

Die Jahrestagung 2025 des SFB Intervenierende Künste findet statt am:

Freitag, 9. Mai 2025, 18 bis 22 Uhr und
Samstag, 10. Mai 2025, 10 bis 20 Uhr

Sie wird organisiert von der Arbeitsgruppe „Digitaler Aktivismus“ in Kooperation mit dem HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

Programm und weitere Informationen folgen.
Zeit & Ort
09.05.2025 – 10.05.2025

HAU 2, Hallesches Ufer 34, 10963 Berlin

Vergangene Termine

International Day Against Police Brutality

15. March 2025
Workshop, Refuge Worldwide, Berlin

This Saturday (11AM-5PM) we welcome Ides Of March, a grass-roots initiative organised by local citizens seeking to raise awareness around the topic of police brutality, in collaboration with KOP Berlin, a campaign for victims of racist police violence.

On March 15th, 1997, the first observation of the international day against police brutality took place in Montreal, Canada, initiated by the Collective Opposed of Police Brutality as a response to extremely violent and racist behaviours perpetrated by authorities. We take this opportunity to explore the topic of police brutality on a local and global level, as well as interlinked practices of racial profiling. With the backdrop of weekly, if not daily, reports of police violence against protestors in Berlin, the topic is more relevant than ever. The event comprises an installation curated by Ides Of March with guest contributors including Aram Bartholl, which is open throughout the event, plus a panel talk from 2:30-3:30PM and free toolkits. The panel talk is titled Beyond The Shields: The Contemporary Function Of Police Brutality In Our Society and will take place in English. The speakers are Ignacio Rosaslanda (Unpublished), Gonca Sağlam (KOP Berlin), reporter Julian Daum and moderator Rahim Chattaika.

Kunstsurfer

1. – 31. March 2025
Einzelausstellung, Your Browser, Internet

KUNSTSURFER is a browser-based art space. It runs on an add-on that recognises advertisements and replaces them with digital exhibitions. KUNSTSURFER brings art into your daily browsing. It plays with the ways online advertisements look and work. It takes over commercial space to host experimental, digital site-specific curatorial and artistic projects.‍

Facts, Fakes and Fears

22. February – 29. March 2025
Gruppenausstellung, Galerie Eigenheim, Weimar

FACTS, FAKES AND FEARS
Desinformationen im Zeitalter von künstlicher Intelligenz und Sozialen Medien
Die Auftaktausstellung zum Jahresprogramm von EIGENHEIM Weimar 2025

Ort: EIGENHEIM Weimar, Gärtnerhaus im Weimarhallenpark, Asbachstraße 1, 99423 Weimar
Eröffnung: 21.02.2025 um 19 Uhr
Dauer: 22.02. – 29.03.2025

teilnehmende Künstler*innen: Gökçen Dilek Acay, Benedikt Braun, Cosima Göpfert, Frankfurter Hauptschule, Alison Jackson, Tea Mäkipää, Tommy Neuwirth, Sarah Oh-Mock, Julian Palacz, Michal Schmidt, Julia Scorna, Marcus Sternbauer, Anke Stiller, Addie Wagenknecht, Moritz Wehrmann, Lars Wild, The Yes Man, 庄睿哲 Ruizhe Zhuang

Total Screen Time: BRAINROT

1. February 2025
Gruppenausstellung, panke.gallery, Berlin

After the success of the Athenian version of Total Screen Time, and after ‘Brainrot’ was voted last year’s word of the year, we are back in Berlin! No,no we are so,so back! Meanwhile, everyone seems to be obsessed with their screen time. Some are trying to downsize it, some are accepting their ‘terminally online’ identity, some perceive it as a competition, and some—as always, simply don’t care.

Enough with the heavy! We invited thirty artists to present digital works through their own personal devices, extending an intimate invitation for audiences to peer through the artist’s screen—a portal into their unique, brainrot-filled worlds. From personal and collective imagery to camp, critical takes on surveillance, viral memes, and wholesome escapism—artworks from every corner of the digital psyche are on display. This one night exhibition is about connecting, sharing in the joy of deep-frying our brains, rather than in isolation. And we think THAT’S HOT!

Curated by:
Aram Bartholl & Socrates Stamatatos

Participating artists:
!Mediengruppe Bitnik with Selena Savić & Gordan Savičić, Afroditi Panagiotakou & Manolis Manousakis, Aleksandra Domanović, Clusterduck, Constant Dullaart, Cory Arcangel, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Darsha Hewitt, Dirk Paesmans, Esben Holk, Evan Roth, Igor Štromajer, Ingrid Hideki, Ipek Burçak, Jan Berger, Joan Heemskerk, Joana Moll, Joanna Bacas, Jonas Lund, Katerina Baxevani, Kathrin Hunze, Marsunev, Miltos Kontogiannis, Nadja Buttendorf, Nestor Siré, Niko Princen, Nora Al-Badri, Olaf Val, Ria Schöneberger, Theo Trianfyllidis

Total Screen Time is a one night group exhibition on phones! All participating artists will bring a phone with their artwork on it, which will be mounted on the walls of the exhibition space. The idea behind the show is that the audience gets to peep through the hole of the artist’s phones immersing into their artworks. LET’S BRAINROT TOGETHER! 🧠 In a collective and liberating moment we asked all artists and visitors to share their daily phone screen time during the opening. WE ARE ALL GETTING EXPOSED LOL 🎀

Bilder

Blog Archiv für Monat: Juli 2020

Fossilien des Spätkapitalismus – Monopol

Juli 18, 2020

Aram Bartholl has salvaged rental bikes and scooters from the Spree River—and is now exhibiting them as material relics of the platform economy in Berlin

It takes a second to recognise these two-wheeled artefacts for what they really are: electric scooters and cheap rental bikes that are usually scattered around the city, their poisonous colours vying for our attention. The greenish layer of mud and algae coating them gives them the look of historical relics. Currently on view in the Journey into a Living Being exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, they could almost be objects from a fictional history, treasures recovered from Damien Hirst’s 2017 Wreck of the Unbelievable.

They have, in fact, merely been fished out of the Spree after being thrown in by people in a destructive rage. Perhaps out of frustration with the uncomfortable rickety wheels, or anger at how invasive the electric scooters have become, spreading through the city on a pretext of more environmentally friendly transportation. Artist Aram Bartholl has dredged them up again. In the brightly lit exhibition space, the bikes and scooters, now home to innumerable small crabs and worms, reveal themselves to be material outgrowths of platform capitalism dominated by web providers like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
Calculated destruction.

The scores of scooter and bicycle suppliers in major international cities are currently faced with tough competition. Damage to the stock, which is treated with so much less care than private possessions, kicked, broken, thrown into rivers and canals, is factored into turnover calculations. The e-scooters in particular, with their resource-intensive lithium-ion batteries, lay bare the fact that sustainable, shared private transport turns out to have been an empty promise. Digital capitalism also produces huge piles of rubbish.

As a post-internet artist, Bartholl explores how the logic of the internet and the new economy is changing consumer behaviour and self-perception, and deconstructing our concept of privacy. Bicycles from companies like Nextbike, Mobike, and Lidl were featured in Bartholl’s 2017 work Your parcel has been delivered (to your neighbour). At that time, he collected them from public areas around the city, stacking them into a huge pile to create a sculpture in the private space of a gallery.

Article in german at ->

https://www.monopol-magazin.de/aram-bartholl-fossilien-des-spaetkapitalismus

Crossing Property Lines

Juli 18, 2020

Prof. Agnes Förster and Martin Bangratz from Urban planing RWTH Aachen invited me to their podcast series „Whats Next„. Below their article accompanying the conversation in German. Thx!!

 https://www.planung-neu-denken.de/podcasts/crossing-property-lines/

Crossing Property Lines

The relatively soft lockdown in Germany has forced innovation on many firms and schools, revealing the country’s shortcomings in the area of digital transformation, such as broadband access. While some of Aram Bartholl’s friends in the arts and programming scene notice hardly any difference in their routines, other, less digitalized professions have been hit hard. For Mr. Bartholl himself, teaching online has turned out to be a challenge. But what struck him most was the temporary absence of urban public space as a platform for expression. It feels liberating to see large demonstrations back in the city, both for noble and questionable causes.

Aram Bartholl’s work has dealt with digital space since his thesis in architectural studies in 2001. Back then he started with simple interventions – taking boxes from computer games and placing them in the city. He was looking at games such as first-person shooters, where the knowledge of a virtual space is crucial to the gameplay. And he found himself wondering: what does it mean to place objects from a digital realm into physical space? Do the spaces merge, or do they still belong to separate worlds?

This dualism of what is analogue and what is digital is so intertwined these days, that we are unable to distinguish one from the other. […] Of course, everything that happens there is real, it has an effect on our lives. Aram Bartholl 06/2020

A number of techno-social upheavals of our lifetime have influenced Bartholl’s work, as he observes the permeation of digital technology. The first disillusionment around 2000, when the dotcom bubble burst, the introduction of smartphones in 2007, the rise of global Internet corporations. Aram Bartholl has followed these trends closely and is still astonished by the dynamics of these tools which are so inscribed in our society; a tweet by the American president may cause immediate reactions in the stock market or foreign relations. The effects of technological developments are also becoming increasingly manifest in our cities. An early example were delivery services that visibly affect urban logistics and business closures. More recently, electric scooters and bicycles have turned up in cities worldwide – demanding our attention with a colorful design reminiscent of animated icons back in a web 2.0 era. They are objects that seem to bring the promise of a trendy internet startup into urban space, Silicon Valley Solutionism arriving in cities around the globe. Unsurprisingly, their promise of a shift towards sustainable mobility has yet to occur, as that would require political guidance and many other factors to align.

Urban space has always been a native ground for Bartholl’s work. To him, it is more exciting than the white cube with its preconceived notions and expectations about art. Outside, the audience is random and may start a discourse that would never happen in a controlled artistic environment. To encourage people to think critically about the relationship of private property and public space, Aram Bartholl recently took rental bikes from the street to exhibit them as sculptures in a gallery. Visitors were still free to rent the bikes and take them back outside, but the project challenged people’s notions of ownership, of public and private space. In a follow-up project, Bartholl is fishing algae-covered electric scooters out of Berlin’s channels to display at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, showing once again that their promise of sustainability doesn’t hold water.

We are currently experiencing social media and the internet profoundly as a public space for discussion – in contrast to urban space – even though these platforms are run by private firms, with all the problems this entails. Aram Bartholl 06/2020

Just as private objects start to clog up public space, the digital space we perceive as public space is in fact in the hands of private corporations. Inoffensive mottos and ludic logotypes suggest harmlessness, but these firms are ultimately listed and profit-oriented. This seems problematic considering the history of privatization of other public infrastructures. Europe is hard-pressed to develop independent digital infrastructures.

In 2010, Aram Bartholl began a project that has since turned into a global movement: Dead Drops are flash drives embedded in a wall so that only the USB connector sticks out. Not connected to the internet, they constitute a statement against censorship and about the relationship between our new, digital reality, and the brick and mortar of cities. New Dead Drops still pop up, over 2.500 are currently listed globally [link: deaddrops.com]. Sharing things digitally through concepts such as open source and creative commons has led to unprecedented levels of collective production and consumption of content. Movements such as Fridays For Future or Black Lives Matter would not have been possible without the viral effects of social networks. In another recent example, the German hacker and programming community has pushed the government to adopt an open-source approach to their COVID19 tracking app.

Data should be free, Bartholl agrees, yet he urges us to consider what could happen with our data in the future. If research institutions are using photos found online to train artificial intelligence models that may ultimately be used for military purposes, it raises questions about the merit of uploading billions of images each day. And movements such as the alt-right have been quick to adopt internet and meme culture and learned to improve their own false-flag tactics.

Aram Bartholl continues his investigation of technology and space. Given the current discussion around the removal of outmoded monuments, he tinkers with augmented reality to attach digital artefacts to sculptures. And, referencing the hashtag #natureishealing, he announces that he will be fishing for more discarded bicycles in the river Spree.

Aram Bartholl is a Berlin based concept artist who investigates the relationship between digital and physical space. Since 2019, Bartholl teaches art with a focus on digital media as a professor at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

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