Frankfurt am Main, July 7 – September 6, 2020, https://www.portikus.de Hajra Waheed´s installation in Portikus consists of an empty room with a white carpet, where all visitors are required to take their shoes off. From above an array of speakers is suspended in the space. A mellow soundtrack of humming voices is played back. The…
Berlin, Embassy of Canada, 19:00, January 29, 2020 The Marschall McLuhan lecture is a one of the traditional events opening the lecture program of transmediale. Mél Hogan is an assistant professor in Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her research is on server farms and data centers – their social implications and…
Frankfurt am Main, June 20 – July 14, 2019, https://www.staedelmuseum.de The graduates of the Staedelschule are very blessed to be from a school attached to a large museum, resulting in the wonderful opportunity to have their graduation show in the generous museum space, in immediate proximity to already canonized artists-masters. The “inherited” exhibition architecture of…
Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe, March 31 – June 16, 2019, https://www.museumsinclairhaus.com Before visiting the show I had a faint idea about the artist´s work based on the news I glimpsed from the 2015 Venice Biennial: boat, read threads, keys.. Somehow this artist branding was confirmed. There was a lot of red, there were threads, there…
Düsseldorf, October 7, 2018 – April 28, 2019, https://www.julia-stoschek-collection.net I was very impressed on my first visit to the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf: A perfect installation of a video-only show. Even the fact that all projections in a video show work as expected in quite extraordinary, but on top of that the light and…
Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, January 31 – February 3, 2019, http://transmediale.de Day 1 At HKW visitors were welcomed by a pinkish illumination both on the outside and inside of the building. It felt like a butchers shop display. Inside the air smelled a bit funky. The combination of architectural shapes, color and smell…
Frankfurt am Main, June 30 – September 2, 2018, http://www.portikus.de/ The installation of Arim Rungjang, a Thai artist who made his first biennale appearances in the last few years, consisted of one large dark room with video projections on all walls except the entrance. The room was very dark, especially as one was entering straight…
Cologne, April 18 – August 12, 2018, http://www.museum-ludwig.de/ I have come across Haegue Yang’s work previously in some large and prestigious shows like documenta (13), Taipei Biennial 2014 or Art Basel Art Fair. But I did not feel very close to her work. She was the “window blinds” artist for me, the work seemed cold,…
Berlin, Feb 4, 2018, https://transmediale.de This was the concluding panel of transmediale. I was expecting some references to Norbert Wiener and Roy Ascott. Instead panelists stubbornly kept invoking Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler. Of course not only. I found Eva Majewska’s introduction of the concept of counterpublics at least interesting (a social group delimiting itself…
Berlin, 12:30, Feb 04, 2018, https://transmediale.de A freeform conversation between Heidenreich (art theory lecturer) and O’Dwyer (digital/blockchain researcher). Heidenreich’s main thesis was to abolish money and think about other forms of “matching” supply and demand. Nevertheless in his examples he kept falling back on some systems of ranking and recording that again used numeric form,…