Opening 16.12. 6pm

The use of social media has become part of everyday life, established and young artists cannot and no longer want to do without it. They work with it. They are where their audience is. Once they were websites, now they’re social media, especially Instagram when it comes to visual arts.

After the protagonists of Net Art, the technology utopians of the early 1990s, soon realized that the Net would not undermine classical art institutions as exhibition venues, the next generation of artists who responded to the Internet took over. The buzzword Post-Internet Art quickly spread. The term was coined by the artist and theorist Marisa Olson: „I’m going to toggle back and forth between video and internet because some of the internet art that I make is on the internet, and some is after the internet.“ What sounds like an attitude to life became a collective term for artists who, instead of making art in the browser, again made art for the exhibition space.

Social Media Art, on the other hand, takes up Net Art’s utopia of being able to democratize the art world. The audience can be reached directly via Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and Twitter. Young artists react to social media and their content, to new features and technologies.

The show „Link in Bio. Kunst nach den sozialen Medien“ at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig curated by Anika Meier presents over 50 works on how the production and reception of art change in the age of social media. The exhibition shows installations, photographs, sculptures, videos and paintings. The show is a follow-up to „Virtual Normality. Net Artists 2.0“ (2018).

Participating artists: Thomas Albdorf, Jeremy Bailey, Viktoria Binschtok, Aram Bartholl, Arvida Byström, Nadja Buttendorf, Petra Cortright, Filip Custic, Constant Dullaart, Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg, Anna Ehrenstein, Oli Epp, Tom Galle, Adam Harvey, Lauren Huret, Andy Kassier, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olia Lialina, Brandon Lipchik, Jonas Lund, Jillian Mayer, Florian Meisenberg, Marisa Olson, Andy Picci, Sebastian Schmieg, Leah Schrager, Kristina Schuldt, Thomas Webb, Steffen Zillig and many others.

Opening 16.12.2019, 18 o’clock

The exhibition is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Aram Bartholl delves in to origins, effects and legacies of our daily usage of social media through portable devices. Built on the ashes of a scaled, thin-paper model of the Facebook HQ front sign in Menlo Park, California, which burned down in a fire before the opening, the exhibition brings together in a cohesive installation a new set of printed, sculptural and video works.

A recent study reported on the New York Times by writer and journalist Benedict Carey, found that phone users switched screen activities every 20 seconds on average, and rarely spent more than 20 minutes uninterrupted doing any one of them. With the daily screen time of an adult being 8 to 10 hours today, scientists have started to look into our habits and screen-shifting patterns. Adapting the concept of genome, the genetic code that determines the characteristics of a living beings, experts feel now able to identify a “screenome”, as each individual screen-time experience appears to be sequential, disjointed and unique.

A series of floating open hands, the images of which are photos from an online stock agency, gesture towards one another in a semi-open position, as a sign of collaboration and participation as well as leading back to the way we hold our smartphones. The withstanding frame of the burned-up work remains on its ashes at the center of the room, while a video of the fire – apolitical act of protest against what is today the largest sharing platform, is playing on a screen. A number of disused phones lies on the ground on a pile of fire-retardant debris, some of which have come to cover copies of a free local newspaper on a nearby table. Inside, an article denounces swimmers’ difficulties in separating from their smartphone while in the waters of the river Aare, Switzerland.

The personal computer, the internet and, most recently, the smartphone represents a paradigm shift in the way we communicate today. The promise of openness and equality of the World Wide Web has now been superseded by gigantic sharing platforms such as Facebook which, together with our devices, collect and contain the most intimate track record of our emotional and personal history. Shading light on a society of which interactions are shaped and controlled by machines we cannot fully understand neither control, making us in fact controlled by them, Bartholl addresses electronic waste as a moment of emotional detachment from our past experiences though equally liberating from the slavery of control to which we are involuntarily subjected.

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

curated by
Anika Meier & Aram Bartholl
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

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

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

The exhibition snap+share gives visitors a new way to visualize — and experience — how photographs have become so ubiquitous in our daily lives. Whether through early examples of 1960s and ’70s mail art, physical piles of pictures uploaded to the Internet over a 24-hour period, or a working refrigerator that allows participatory meme-making, visitors can trace the evolution of sharing photographs.

Spanning the history of mail art to social networks, the show presents a variety of artists working in various media, from framed paper-based art to immersive installations. Some of these artists include On Kawara, Ray Johnson, Moyra Davey, Erik Kessels, Corinne Vionnet, and David Horvitz. Exploring how networks are created through the act of sending images out into the world, this exhibition reveals just how those networks have changed in the age of the Internet.

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

Opening event: 24.01.2019 | 19h
Duration: 25.01 – 10.03.2019
Opening Hours: Friday – Sunday, 13h – 19h

For his upcoming solo show True Depth at SMAC Aram Bartholl creates a new set of works discussing the changing circumstances of personal space in today’s screen based, app connected world. While the smartphone introduced new ways of very intimate communication, Internet advertising companies monetize in large scale on these interactions. Traveling alone in public space became the perfect situation for personal interaction on small screens. “Don’t sit next to me on the bus. I am watching gay porn.” (quote Twitter). While out with friends the restaurant bathroom turns into a place to check the phone instead of actually going there to relieve one self. Post social spaces.
The title True Depth refers to the latest iPhone camera 3D scanning technology to improve face recognition. Invisible infrared patterns questions the personal space between eyes and screen. “Where are you?”

Security Personal Information Protection High Strength Spring Anchor Collapsible

Interview for SMAC: http://smac-berlin.de/interview-aram-bartholl

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Solo show at Emmanuel gallery, Denver University of Colorado
August 31 – November 17, 2018
Opening August 30, 6:00 pm