TANGLED DEPICTIONS

Michele Gabriele

Curated by Mattia Giussani

23 August 2019 — 22 September 2019

Gossamer Fog presents Tangled Depictions, the first UK solo show of Milan-based artist Michele Gabriele , curated by London-based independent curator Mattia Giussani.

Gossamer Fog
186a Deptford High Street
SE8 3PR London
United Kingdom

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The last few years have been marked by a radical shift in how information is spread and diffused. The high speed and effortless way in which we are bombarded by information, true or false, leave us with an openness and confusion that brings us to shift within these different representations of realities, feeling helpless in front of it, and yet trusting them as we almost become integrated with them due to technological advancements. The information systems of today’s capitalism, as highlighted by Dr. Nishant Shah (2019)[i], rely on the fact that we don’t trust each other, so how is it possible to avoid taking this situation for granted? How do we co-exist with this feeling of discomfort?

For his first solo exhibition in the UK “Tangled Depictions”, Michele Gabriele is presenting a new body of sculptural works that explore and consider how the representation of ideas and events are currently portrayed, analysing how information is used in order to spread a complex and multiple knowledge of the different systems which are the foundation of today’s knowledge-intensive capitalism. With 4 different sculptures of the series “It’s always so hard to admit that things are different than what we had believed at first sight” (2018-ongoing series), the artist wants to highlight in a straight-forward and intimate way, how difficult it is to accept happenings/ideas/objects/beings for what they are, as well as the human tendency to not embrace their true meaning, not wanting to accept things that are different from what one has always believed.

Michele Gabriele reflects on these circumstances by analysing the representation of extinct beings, such as dinosaurs in mainstream culture, and the way they are depicted in movies like Jurassic Park. It has been proved that these creatures are generally more similar to chickens and poultry[ii], rather than those scary yet beautiful beings a generation built their dreams and fears on. The work, as the artist explains in a recent interview[iii], presents an obvious and redundant dichotomy: one side is figurative, modelled in a two-component epoxy resin and oil painting, the other is made with commonly used materials and objects, selected for two reasons: the capacity to emphasize this two-dimensionality and the ability to suggest an imaginary (or more specific imaginaries), decorating the sculpture with random ornamental and abstract friezes.

The double-face of the sculptures focuses and emphasizes the misconception when looking at the artworks, especially when seen them in photographs as it suggests that the entire sculpture is hiding its second, more abstract and two-dimensional face or vice versa. The ways we perceive different representations of reality, and the way we make them ours, are a key part of these sculptures. Looking at the artist’s work, it is evident how these interconnections of realities form our opinions for particular argument, especially when something is not intended to have that specific meaning.

Michele Gabriele’s works representations are the perfect example of what Tristan Garcia (2015) calls ‘the abstraction of the presence of things’[iv]. As the French philosopher states, ‘representation is a constraint produced by art and incorporated in an object by work, which forces our perception to absent a part of the presence of things.’ The tangled representations of realities produced by the artworks, both due to technological advancements and the blind faith we put in the systems produced by the intensive-knowledge capitalism, added to the intrinsic capacity of the artist to emphasize this duality, make these works unique and complex. With these interventions, the artist is trying to show how these tense representations of different aspects of today’s life are embedded in the human vision of the contemporary and how difficult it is to escape it.

Text by Mattia Giussani

[i] Sha, N. (2019) The Measure of Trust: From analogue extensivity to digital intensity. Available at:

https://www.digitalearth.art/magazine/2016/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-ftcregulations

[ii] https://gizmodo.com/this-new-dinosaur-looked-an-awful-lot-like-a-chicken-179483378

[iii] Gabriele, M. (2019) Interview with Michele Gabriele. Available at: http://atpdiary.com/michelegabriele/

[iv] Garcia, T. (2015) ‘In Defense of Representation’, in Cox, C. ; Jaskey, J. ; Malik, S. (ed.) Realism Materialism Art, Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, p.250, 251

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Ph. by Samuel Capps

UNKNOWN SYNERGY

Lito Kattou

27 May 2019 — 29 June 2019

Tile Project Space presents Unknown Synergy, the first Italian solo show of Athens-based artist Lito Kattou.

 The exhibition, curated by London-based curator Mattia Giussani, will present a new body of mixed media works by the artist. Kattou will come up with a new approach of exploring the ideas and synergies surrounding the roles of human and non-human agents, as well as which implications these relationships have on the ecological transformation, adaptability and concerns.

Tile Project Space
Via Garian 64
20100 Milan
Italy

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UNKNOWN SYNERGY

 “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely”. [i] This is the alarming opening statement of a recent report released at the end of April 2019, from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent organism created by United Nations in 2012. In this new ecological world without nature[ii], where conditions of species survival on planet Earth are deteriorating year by year, how is it possible to tackle and analyse the relationships between human and non-humans agents? Within the contemporary techno-capitalistic structure, in what terms should we discuss humans relationships with non-humans agents living in the same uncertain world?

 As the German scholar Erich Horl[iii] states, “Ecology” has started to designate the collaboration of a multiplicity of human and nonhuman agents: it is something like the cipher of a new thinking of togetherness and of a great cooperation of entities and forces, which has begun to be significant for contemporary thought.

For her first solo exhibition in Italy, “Unknown Synergy”, Lito Kattou produced a new series of human-like sculptures of bodies shaped as a composition, an assembly of human, technological and natural parts that come together to form something that reminds a new form of environmental creatures. Looking at the artist’s series of work “Body”, the complexity of the shapes used in each of the three sculptures is striking. In these visibly digitally fabricated aluminium artworks, the different composing elements are fluid and harmonic, interconnected to one another. A flower-headed upper part of a human body and legs with a stingray attached to them, commanded by a screen; a resembling like fish; a deconstructed human figure powered by a turbine motor. All of the sculptures have hand-painted drawings or acrylic paintings of sunsets and landscapes that are carried as “equipment”, attributes, adornments and abstract skills by the bodies.

 The influence and role of technology in these hybrid beings is visible in their functioning, and as expressed by theorist Luciana Parisi, “Ecology involves the capacities of the environment, defined in terms of a multiplicity of interlayered milieus or localities, to become generative of emergent forms and patterns”[iv] (Parisi, 2017) . These newly formed patterns are a typical example of what the Cypriot artist is trying to expose with her sculptures. Ecology, intended as a synergy of different organisms and agencies, generating new types of figures and configurations, something that can be linked to and seen as a realization of what critical posthumanist Rosi Braidotti would see as a post-anthropocentric model that places the preservation of the “dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself”[v] (Braidotti, 2013).

 It is possible to say then that synergy has become the “principle of principles of ecology”[vi] (Neyrat, 2017) that characterizes our contemporary condition. As a consolidated fact that nature doesn’t exist anymore as previously intended in this ecological condition, ‘everything makes itself over and over again, endlessly constituting and reconstituting itself, ceaselessly becoming’ (Neyrat, 2017)[vii]. This can be recalled with the fragile Mediterranean dried milk thistles that the artist uses. In this new version, the copper electroformed thistles can be interpreted in different meanings. They can be used in an encounter, gifts to be given to other bodies, or paying tributes to bodies that are gone. Nature that repeats itself over and over again, carrying with it different values and uses.

 Looking at the artist’s work, it is clear how this (once) unknown synergy between humans and non-humans is fundamental, and how breaking these interconnections is not a viable option. The fragile equilibrium, and yet a connectiveness that pervades Kattou’s work, envisions and mirrors the key topics of debate regarding ecological worlds, showing how the separation between all the agencies that populate Earth would not be possible and how it would be counter-productive, exposing the very changes we’re dealing on a day to day basis, and envisioning what the future is holding for us.

[i] https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

[ii] Morton, T. (2010) ‘The Ecological Thought’, Cambridge, United States: Harvard University Press.

[iii] Hörl, E. (2017) ‘Introduction to general ecology - The ecologization of thinking’, in Hörl, E. (ed.) General Ecology, The New Ecological Paradigm, London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, p.3

[iv] Parisi, L. (2017) ‘Computational Logic and ecological rationality’, in Hörl, E. (ed.) General Ecology, The New Ecological Paradigm, London: Bloomsbury, p.83.

[v] Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity press, p.60

[vi] Neyrat, F. (2017) ‘Elements for an Ecology of separation – Beyond ecological constructivism’, in Hörl, E. (ed.) General Ecology, The New Ecological Paradigm, London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, p.101

[vii] Neyrat, F. (2017) ‘Elements for an Ecology of separation – Beyond ecological constructivism’, in Hörl, E. (ed.) General Ecology, The New Ecological Paradigm, London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, p.104

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Ph. by Elena Radice

HEEDFUL SIGHT

Joachim Coucke and Maurizio Vicerè

25 Nov 2018 — 20 Jan 2019

Like A Little Disaster is proud to presents “Heedful Sight”, curated by Mattia Giussani, a show focusing at how to look at the changes between the physical and digital realm.

The exhibition will present new, collaborative and recent mixed media works by two emerging artists: Joachim Coucke and Maurizio Vicerè.

The artists in this show will investigate, challenge and come up with new ways of addressing the flow of information in a digital environment, as well as the change of the ecological structure due to these technological changing.

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“Heedful Sight” is the second appointment of TALEA, a series of projects curated by Like A Little Disaster focused on the practices of international curators. TALEA (in Italian) is a piece of a plant used for vegetative (asexual) propagation. It is generally placed in soil or water – if the conditions are suitable, the plant piece will begin to grow as a new form of life independent of the parent.

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Foothold / Like A Little Disaster
Via Cavour, 68
Polignano a Mare (Bari)
Italy

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In the digital automated society we all live in today, we on the one hand feel as though we are watched, violated or spied on by government agencies and corporations, and on the other we ourselves are prying into other people’s lives through the constant stream of social media feeds. Two recent examples of this condition are GCHQ, one of the UK’s intelligence agencies, that intends to increase its large-scale data hacking^, and Google, that is helping military and intelligence agencies to spy on us with its Google Earth service*. This omnipresent dichotomy, this on-going experience of being watched and watching, is a key contradiction of current human behaviour caused by our dependence on computational and technological structure, especially on a cognitive and ecological level.

In Heedful Sight, Joachim Coucke and Maurizio Viceré bring together different elements of their contrasting work to explore the causes and effects of this collision. Looking at their work within this exhibition, you can see how the two opposites act like divergent forces, like two different battery poles that complement each other at the same time.  

Maurizio Viceré’s on-going work series, kh, produced between 2017 and 2018, is spread in all three rooms of the art space. The five paintings present themselves with different meanings and by looking at the digitally modified landscapes, many questions and recollections arise. These black and blue, dark-toned images show us unclear, foggy, pixelated landscapes. On the surface they can be seen as the distorted images of the screensavers you get by default every time you buy a new computer or laptop. But at second glance, they can be understood both as an exhausted ecological environment out of which raw materials have been extracted to produce the technological gadgets we all use nowadays, and as a post-apocalyptic version of the sky, with sky clouds that allude to the digital cloud we all store our data in. Notice that the Google logo is present in all his paintings. Every logo is almost camouflaged within the paintings, making them hard to see. However, having them positioned in all of the three rooms of the space, it makes the logo’s slightly more noticeable. It’s a clear association between the digital environment created through technology and the omnipresence of Google inside it. Computation today is becoming culture and with regards to Google: it is the index and arbiter of all human knowledge. Inevitably, whatever is found on Google becomes what people think.

How do these circumstances, in which our knowlegde is almost imposed on us, effect our vision and perception of the world, especially with regards to the future?

Joachim Coucke’s seven mixed media works, all part of the series Dwellers, explore those issues. These sculptures, installed in the rooms at different heights, are an assemblage of different kinds of technological and plastic waste. Some of them are placed on the floor, while others are hung on the wall or are hidden above you. The care and attention to detail stands out. In their related simplicity, they are complex and rich of visible detail which go unnoticed at first. Hard-drive vents, small LED monitors, cables, tablet screen frames are just a few of the technological waste items produced by nowadays digital capitalism. Observing the space, it seems like these conglomerates are travelling and/or discovered in Viceré’s landscape works. These sculptures represent a new type of digital fossils, showing how futile technological waste is considered to be, and at the same time it exposes how disruptive these parts actually are. Together with these materials that re-enter the ecological realm in a different form compared to when they were extracted as raw material, human face masks are present too. These emotion-less and un-expressive masks allude to a loss of human consciousness parallel to and dependent on technological advancements, as if we’re losing pieces of our agencies and critical thought..

A new collaborative video piece between the artists called On Hiatus, closes the journey within the show. The video combines a Viceré’s landscape with sentences from Coucke like ‘Covered in Data Like a New Skin’, ‘Dwell in a Never Ending Present’ or ‘Autocorrected viral Flavors’, and a background noise like the sound of server rooms. This first video of the ongoing series gives us a few suggestions and clues on the transformation that is happening - and that will continue to happen - to human activities, with a central role that is given to the noise to accentuate the confusion and uncertainty of the present moment.

In Heedful Sight extension of ourselves, ecological elements, feeling trapped within a thin limbo of being the observer and the observed, an in-depth approach of the inability of finding solution of how to solve this situation seems lost. Within this delicate connection and balance between the two artistic practices, uncertainty about the future is key, leaving the interpretation to different solutions open, if these want to be found.

Mattia Giussani

^ Doward, J. (2018) GCHQ boosts powers to launch mass data hacking. Available at:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/08/gchq-bulk-hacking-hacking-human-rights-privacy-alarm

* Leving, Y. (2018) Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/20/googles-earth-how-the-tech-giant-is-helping-the-state-spy-on-us

1 Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age – Technology and The End of The Future, London, United Kingdom: Verso Books, p.89

Photos by Like a Little Disaster

Future Fictions

Pakui Hardware, Joey Holder, Core.Pan and Viktor Timofeev

07 Sep — 14 Oct 2017

Assembly Point is delighted to present Future Fictions an exhibition, curated by Mattia Giussani, exploring the different effects of digital capitalism in everyday life.

The show will present new and recent mixed media works by Pakui Hardware, Joey Holder, Core.Pan and Viktor Timofeev – some of whom will be showing in the UK for the first time.

The artists will investigate and challenge the effect of automation and algorithms on digital lives and existence. They will address the making of objects and production of performances under the rules of digital capitalism, examining how their textures and existences change within new experiences of technological ecology.

Seasons:

I had waded through desert landscapes, climbed mountains, faded into lakes, traversing overgrown fields offering nothing but an endless horizon. I detoured via desolate interiors of emptied skyscrapers, hollow shopping malls, former car parks. Harvesting weeds from abandoned gardens and washing myself with water accumulated in ponds resting like uninhabited portals outside of former mega-cities. Presence echoed in absence, just in accordance with the automated cycles.

With my mind in bondage by the occurrence of the present tense, I attempted versions, sculpting fan fictions of alternative Earth histories. In order to retain the future I had to approach the past, bisecting the smell of a sacrificed era.

Seasons returned in patterned sequence. Summer emerging like a dinosaur baby cracking open from its egg. Sun morphing to grey as swarms moved from the southern hemisphere. After all I had witnessed I now omitted my question marks with a simple swipe, an auto-generated cognitive response. In these moments, I depicted myself as a buddha sunbathing in the midst of a volcano. It elevated me and I observed the different layers at stake. Meditating from a bird’s perspective I could perceive some of the levels still being a promise of regrowth, of rituals and lyrics being performed in silence.

I studied the work of grid engineers as I tried to keep myself aligned. Derailed only momentarily, as a concept of speeding up the fiction. Some of the spongy zones offered a perfect exploration of genetic insurgencies, perennial bacteria, and a plethora of mind-morphing drugs. A constant sensation of there being more than the mere things that were taking place.

With a thousand networked braids resting along my spine, I could feel the wind approaching hours ahead, allowing me to seek shelter from the angels’ harps. Tickling my perception, always close to slipping. I held it together even when the algorithms were feeding off my brain. I let them wiggle through my maze. The magnetic fields seeping through me, sound my cells, ask for resonance, I became its instrument.

 I uncomfortably embodied the mythos of the lonesome traveler, a contemporary Ovid in neoprene on the run from an elision of language.

Matilda Tjäder, 2017

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Pakui Hardware is the collaborative artist duo formed by Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda. In their work, the duo traces Capital traveling through bodies and materials. Their latest solo shows include venues of MUMOK, Vienna, EXILE Gallery, Berlin, Tenderpixel, London (forthcoming), Podium, Oslo, ExoExo, Paris, kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Jenifer Nails, Frankfurt, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, 321 Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. The artists have participated in group shows at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, Kunstverein Brauschweig, Germany, 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, Sao Paulo (forthcoming), National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, MMOMA, Moscow, Valentin, Paris, Zacheta National Gallery Showroom, Warsaw, among others.

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Joey Holder graduated from Kingston University in 2001 and completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Working with scientific and technical experts she makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. Recent solo/group exhibitions include SELACHIMORPHA, The Photographers Gallery, London (2017); Alien Matter part of Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari’s project The 3D Additivist Cookbook, Transmediale, Berlin (2017); The Noise OF Being, Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam (2017); Ophiux, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2016).

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Core.Pan is an artistic research program developed by Sybil Montet De Doria & Simon Kounovsky initiated in may 2016.  The duo’s work is based on an extensive reflexion around symbiotic engineering and global mutations, using augmented materiality and film as a way to approach the relationships between metaphysical cosmology, high-end technology and biomimetic evolutionary process. Recent exhibitions include ‘ys mantic systems’ at Noplace gallery, Oslo; KMS / Aftermath at Galerie A.M.180 Prague; CITIZENFIVE, part of ART ATHINA 2017

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Viktor Timofeev currently lives and works in Rotterdam, NL. He is a recent graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include “Sazarus IV” at Two Queens in Leicester (2017), “S.T.A.T.E.” at Drawing Room, London (2016), and “Sazarus I” at Jupiter Woods, Vienna (now Cordova). Recent group exhibitions include “Roy Da Prince” at Futura, Prague (2016), “Piknik Na Obochine” at Exo Exo, Paris (2016) and “Vaporents” at Voidoid Archive, Glasgow (2016). He has recently released a musical collaboration with Kaspars Groševs titled “Zolitude” on the online-based Quantum Natives, and is currently working on a solo release for the label.

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Photo by Ben Westoby Photography

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This project was supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute

Non Standard

Curated by Mattia Giussani 

Lea Collet & Marios Stamatis, Anne De Boer, Joey Holder,Anna Mikkola, Eva Papamargariti.

Opening reception 8 June 2017 6 - 9 pm 

8 June - 23 July 2017 

Click Here to read the catalogue essay written by me.

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Non Standard is a show exploring the relations between human, nature and technology within 21st century networked capitalism. 

The exhibition will present new and recent mixed media works by 6 emerging UK based artists, some of them showing for the first time in Italy: Lea Collet & Marios Stamatis, Anne De Boer, Joey Holder,Anna Mikkola, Eva Papamargariti. 

The artists in this show will investigate, challenge and come up with new ways of addressing the large and complex technological structure that it’s disrupting the links between human affections and the surrounding environments. 

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NON STANDARD: Human and technological mediations with surrounding environments

Matilda Tjäder

We can call this a slow (media) technological violence of war [..] It relates to the extended environmental impact of the link between contemporary multitempor(e)alities and the media technological materials as part of supply routes and the processes of fabrication involving rare earths and other earth materials that need to be refined for their usefulness as part of production of electronic objects. 

Parikka, J. (2016) A Slow, Contemporary Violence: Damaged Environments of Technological Culture, p.18, Berlin: Sternberg Press. 

Because what can be gained from notions of time conflates in the moment of verbalization. Tongues suspend temporality, wrap it up like a bouquet of nettles. If it burns, it spits. Language plays the sad protagonist. In absence of a grammatical loop of constant repetition, an arrow is installed to simulate alibi. A human hand picks it up, tightens and bends it, points it in the direction of a gathering point. Behind the back of all woodpecker-like dialogues, some have gathered to breath in choirs, to attest major chords with minor adjustments. Inviting oxygen in their bodies to formulate human weight on earth. 

Author is non and needs everything. Authorship is contested when multiple mouths are synchronously left open. One mouth opens, another mouth delivers the fire. Eating it like fuel, the burning flames lubricate the spitting out of vowels. When sun rises, and tides reside, their intestines are engraved: amorphous circuits finding their way between bodies and soil. Transformation occurs by the slit of each one’s tongue. 

Eradication of sentences, cut up at first. Fabrications now arrive from other scales permeable. With the inevitably radical form of communication, instructions are up for question. To avoid analogy, bend your tongue and start anew. Speaking in tongues by rubbing their tips to the palate. Amalgamations like networks slide down their throats. Swallowing soil, feeding it with fibers. 

Waves are matter that breaks, bends, overlaps, and spreads. It enforces ink to trickle down the canals. Zeros and ones elide abundance. Or, what are their reasons to escape the omnipresence of word objects, when nothing can be reversed and everything can be re-engineered? Permeating a rhythm to aid memory with memorizable formulas. Enveloped and stored in the bodies of the circuit nurtured by fire. Diagnosed as temporal phenomena it breaks the code to write anew. It invokes patterns from signs passed over without semiotic ornament. 

Once I'd engaged in the ritual, affective capitalism traversed my mind and asked for chronological location. It had long since carved out a space as an embryo waiting for more to come. Touching the fabric of my mind pattern. The sensation of the flames witnessed how soil had always been the narrator. 

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Lea Collet & Marios Stamatis are a duo of love based in London. Their collaboration evolves through a range of media such as video, performance, text, and sculpture. They like to use theatre as a method in which they stage the implications of publicly performed affect and embodiment within an emotional capitalism framework. Recent work includes Fair Booth Trial at Carousel; Pills and Potions at Enclave Lab; When Love takes over at AM (London, UK) 2017; We are having a great time :) at Rockelmann & (Berlin, DE); Key Performance Interludes at Green Ray (London, UK); USE/USER/USED at Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK); I Think I'm Experiencing Pure Bliss at Entreprise Project (Athens, GR), 2016; Faith Dollars, Taxfree Imagination & Uptown Bliss and Chorus for Three at Assembly Point (London, UK); Ambiguity Symposium at The Showroom (London, UK), 2015; and online commissions for Cosmos Carl, 2017 and Matchbox TV, 2016.  

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Anne de Boer (1987, Enschede NL) works in London and is currently finishing a MFA at the Goldsmiths University. De Boer co-founded both the Mycological Twist (2014) and HARD-CORE (2011). HARD-CORE is currently teaching their module ‘Documentation and Online Presence’ to the BA of the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Recent projects include: Fair Booth Trial, Carousel, London; Mientras desaparezca, LADRÓNgalería, Mexico City; Beyond Telepathy, Somerset House, London; Splintered Binary, Gossamer Fog, London; Respawn, Temporary Gallery, Cologne; 5 AMAZING TRICKS TO GET RID OF, the Mycological Twist, Friche / Diaspore, London; Something in the Distance, Pando.EnclaveLab, London; Planned Obsolescence, Prolog.Vision, Moscow; KOSMO, Kevin Space, Vienna. 

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Joey Holder graduated from Kingston University in 2001 and completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Working with scientific and technical experts she makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. Recent solo/group exhibitions include SELACHIMORPHA, The Photographers Gallery, London (2017); Alien Matter part of Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari's project The 3D Additivist Cookbook, Transmediale, Berlin (2017); The Noise OF Being, Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam (2017); Ophiux, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2016).

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Anna Mikkola’s visual and written work engages with the boundaries of the human and with the enmeshed reality where the human, nature and technology coexist. Her research moves between interfaces and infrastructures. She drafts narratives where different entities and points in time are woven together. Anna’s work has been shown at ICA and Jupiter Woods in London, Lighthouse in Brighton, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, INDEX 19 and Minibar at Stockholm, among others, and featured in publications such as Kaleidoscope, Rhizome and DIS Magazine. She has given talks at Goldsmiths University in London, at ECAL in Lausanne and at the New Museum in NYC.

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Eva Papamargariti is an artist based in London and holds a Masters Degree in Visual Communication Design from Royal College of Art, London. Papamargariti’s practice focuses on time-based media (video, animations) but also printed material and installations that explore the relationship between digital space and (im)material reality. She is interested in the creation of 2D/3D rendered spaces, forms and geometries that provoke narrations based on the obscure simultaneous situations on the verge of digital and physical. Recent collaborations and commissions include Diesel, Kenzo and MTV and she has exhibited her work in institutions, museums and festivals such as the New Museum (New York), Whitney Museum (New York), Tate Britain (London), Museum of Moving Image (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal and Transmediale Festival, Berlin. Online presentations include Panther Modern, Parallelograms, ANIGIF, 15Folds, Channel Normal, The Wrong-Digital Art Biennale, Eternal Internet Brotherhood, and Cloaque.org. 

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Photo by T-Space Studio

OPENING: July 28, 2016, 6 – 9pm
DURATION: July 29 – September 03, 2016

Group show curated by

::MK-DOS::

Featuring works by

Marija Bozinovska Jones,  Lea Collet, Simone Monsi, Eva Papamargariti, Marios Stamatis, Andrea Williamson

ROCKELMANN& is pleased to announce the start of our new Summer CAMP program featuring the debut exhibition of London/Berlin based curatorial collective ::MK-DOS:: entitled We’re Having a Great Time.

We’re Having a Great Time is a group exhibition of five new media works of varying mediums, produced by six London based-artists (Marija Bozinovska Jones, performance duo Lea Collet & Marios Stamatis, Simone Monsi, Eva Papamargariti and Andrea Williamson). The artists have each composed a new work focusing on the concept of translating life back of the “URL into the IRL”, and in doing so have produced a collection of soft sculptures, performances, video and laser projections and mixed media installations. The show will run at Schönleinstraße 5 from July 29th – September 3rd, 2016.

There will be an opening reception Thursday, July 28th from 6-9pm, with artist performances taking place at 7pm and 8pm:

7 pm: Performance by Lea Collet & Marios Stamatis
8 pm: Performance by Marija Bozinovska Jones

The selected artists have each composed new works focused on the theme of translating life from the “URL into the IRL” and in doing so have produced a collection of sculptures, performances, video and laser projections and mixed media installations.

It was the invention of the contemporary Internet in 1989 that marked the beginning of a now never ending evolution of the human condition now called accelerationism. Today it is hard to see ourselves as a separate entity from technology; we consider it a part of us, we’ve assimilated, we’ve unified and it’s been integrated. We have finally figured out a way to live in the anthropocene, but at what cost? We’re Having a Great Time explores the relationship between algorithmic automation and its quantification of human responses. Through user feedback generated between users and machines the artists, both emerging and well exhibited, have sought to re-appropriate and expose just how all of the time spent URL is affecting us IRL.

::MK-DOS:: was born in September 2015 when two graduate curating students [Mattia Giussani (b. Milan 1986) & Kat Rickard (b. New York 1992)] met in the Goldsmiths art department. They decided to link up and start serving as your personal guides to the underbelly of the anthropocene. Both live and work between London and Berlin.

Arts Catalyst presents 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering Revisited 1966/2016, including a night of new cross-disciplinary performance art and an archival exhibition

Auto Italia in discussion moderated by Mattia Giussani and Brenda Guesnet, Thu 3 November 2016

As part of Arts Catalyst presents 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering Revisited 1966/2016, 'Exhibition Studies Working Group' invites artists Auto Italia to discuss their work.

Auto Italia is an artist run organisation that commissions and produces new work, collaborating directly with emerging artists. For this evening talk they will discuss a range of projects which critically engage with technologies, experimenting with alternative modes of production and exhibition formats. This will include Meet Z, an online personal guide, productivity consultant and creative collaborator. As well as Auto Italia LIVE, nine 1 hour, collectively developed works engaging the histories and format of Television, broadcast live over the internet.

This talk, organised by the ‘Exhibition Studies Working Group’, aim’s to introduce the voice of a younger generation of artists who are critically engaging in the social and political implications of technology. The ‘Exhibition Studies Working Group’ is made up of students from MRes Art: Exhibition Studies, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and MFA Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London. They have been working together for over nine months, to critically reflect on key themes and issues raised by Arts Catalyst’s revisiting of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. As well as this event they have collectively authored a publication of new writing: Transdisciplinary Collaboration, Exhibiting Archives, Re-staging Exhibitions.

About Auto Italia:
Auto Italia South East is an artist run organisation that commissions and produces new work – collaborating directly with emerging artists. Founded in 2007, it aims to provide a framework for developing alternative approaches to production and exhibition formats. Auto Italia is currently run by Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Marleen Boschen and Edward Gillman.

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Exactly fifty years after the legendary 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, Arts Catalyst revisits this hugely influential art event with a new performance commission by Robert Whitman, participating artist in the original 9 Evenings and co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) who produced it. An accompanying exhibition, talks and events programme will be held at Arts Catalyst Centre for Art, Science & Technology and other venues across the city, developed in collaboration with Afterall and students from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and Goldsmiths, University of London.

9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering was initiated by artist Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy Kluver. This 1966 event was a pioneering project in large-scale collaboration between artists and engineers. 9 Evenings was a significant moment in art history when many artists became aware for the first time of the implications that advancements in technology had for the development of their own artwork. Artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Robert Whitman and Yvonne Rainier worked with engineers for 10 months to develop technical equipment and systems that were used as an integral part of the artists’ performances, producing a blend of avant-garde theatre, dance and new technologies. The collaboration produced many ‘firsts’ with specially designed systems and with innovative use of existing equipment.

In October 2016, Arts Catalyst presents a contemporary re-imaging of this seminal event, with a programme throughout the month. Robert Whitman’s performance will be held in The Crossing, an ex-industrial warehouse space in the new Kings Cross development. Whitman will present his new performance, Side Effects, commissioned for this event. This spectacular evening will mix pre-recorded and live-streamed moving image from across the city, animated by a live performance unfolding over eight acts.

Within walking distance, the Arts Catalyst Centre for Art, Science & Technology hosts an exhibition of film footage from the 1966 9 Evenings events, alongside an archival presentation of the broader work of E.A.T., making public this rich history of cross-disciplinary collaboration. In addition, talks developed, in collaboration with Afterall’s Exhibition Histories seriess, will reflect on the histories of art and technology in performance, transdisciplinary collaboration, and the influence of the 1960s on contemporary art today.

Finally, since January 2016 a working group of students from MRes Art: Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins and MFA Curating, Goldsmiths University of London, have been using 9 Eveningsand the work of E.A.T as a starting point to reflect on: re-staging and re-enactments as a method of doing art history, transdisciplinary practice and exhibiting the archive. The result of the working group will be three texts, compiled in a booklet that will be distributed both online and at the Arts Catalyst’s October events. A working group made up of students from MA Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, as well as other programmes, will collectively develop their own performances, to be held at Arts Catalyst’s Centre throughout October.

This programme is supported by Arts Council England, Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The London Community Foundation, PACE, Afterall, Central Saint Martins, UAL, King’s Cross and Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Westminster, London: The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) with the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC) and The Performance Studio.

Meet Z, Auto Italia, 2014. Image courtesy of Auto Italia and the artists.

What does it mean to be Human in the 21st Century? How are technological advancements changing our perception of reality and how we understand it?

Mattia Giussani will speak on various approaches on how we can define the posthuman/transhuman condition by looking at texts from theorist like David Roden and Rosi Braidotti.

This event is part of the Camberwell Space Projects exhibition Into The Fold which runs from 1 March - 15 April 2016.

The one thing we share—exhaustion—makes us an inoperative community, an exhausted community, or a community of the exhausted.' Jan Verwoert

Use/User/Used/ is an exhibition that explores the effects of 24/7 working culture and questions societal pressures to continuously perform. The show presents works from the Zabludowicz Collection alongside new live performance and dance commissions. Together these examine the exhaustive and depletive consequences of a network culture that emphasizes increasing productivity and efficiency in both work and leisure time. Collectively, the works reflect on what it means to be exhausted as a physical body, as a mental state, and as a material resource.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

Showing works from the Zabludowicz Collection are: Nick Darmstaedter, Nicolas Deshayes, Alex Dordoy, Matias Faldbakken, Lizzie Fitch, Yngve Holen, Josh Kline, Nikki S. Lee, Rachel Maclean, Kris Martin, Tobias Madison, Seth Price, Lucy Tomlins, Kirstine Roepstorff, Jack Strange, Artie Vierkant, and Gary Webb.

Newly commissioned live works will be presented by: Lea Collet and Marios Stamatis, Filippo Marzocchi, and Laura Yuile.

Use/User/Used/ confronts a culture driven by consumption and the effects of rapid advances in mass-production and digital technology. With the decrease of manual labour and the rise of increasingly automated systems, endless connectivity, and planned obsolescence, we have created an economy based on systematic exhaustion in which success and fulfilment are mapped by upgrades and improved efficiency. 

Use/User/Used/ is curated by students of the MA/MFA Curating courses at Goldsmiths University of London, Chelsea College of Art, and Sir John Cass College of Art at London Metropolitan University. Produced collaboratively over a period of three months, the resulting exhibition has been selected from over 3000 Collection works and brings together some of the most significant artists in contemporary art with new commissions by artists proposed by the emerging curators.

Combining a diverse cross section of curatorial perspectives from five countries across Europe the participating curators are: Luis Araujo, Mattia Giussani, Lorna McDowell, Giovanni Rendina, Celine Roblin-Robson, Alexine Rodenhuis, Angela Sanchez del Campo, Duarte Sequeira, and Kirsty White.

Graphics by Marios Stamatis

Photo by Tim Bowditch