NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS aims to emphasize the vital role that collaboration in scientific, technological, and artistic domains can play in furthering contemporary research and integrative forms of cutting-edge artistic creation. In its first iteration at STATE Studio in Berlin in July 2020, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS will feature a selection of artworks, objects, and documents highlighting the manifold scope of S+T+ARTS actors and activities—STARTS Prize winners or works of artists from STARTS residencies and STARTS lighthouses.
Through the notion of statuary, as a crucial concept in Western art history with many resonances beyond, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS confronts classicism as it reappears, mutates, decomposes, and re-emerges in research-based art and collaborations with advanced technology today. Since Antiquity, statues emblematize body qualities and highlight the dialectics between artifacts and living beings, representation, and flesh. Kanno and Yamaguchi’s ‘Senseless Drawing Bot’, Egor Kraft’s ‘Content Aware Studies’, Iris van Herpen’s ‘Magnetic Motion’ couture collection, Julia Koerner’s ‘Digital Vogue’ research project new encodings of social memory, monumentality, corporeality, agency, and myth.
Unexpected tensions between time, timelessness, technology, and bare construction also appear in radically abstract kinetic devices such as Ralf Baecker’s ‘Putting the Pieces Back Together Again’, Evelina Domnich and Dimity Gelfand’s ‘Hilbert Hotel’, Refik Anadol’s ‘Melting Memories’, and Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves’s ‘Martian Sun Series’. In ‘By the Code of Soil: (de)Compositions’, by Kasia Molga & Scanner, and ‘I’m Humanity by Etsuko Yakushimaru’, the living appears as a generative element in the artwork that permeates the world beyond.
NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS EXHIBITION
Saturday, 4th – Sunday, 26th July 2020 | Tue–Fri 12:00-19:00 | Sat-Sun 12:00 – 17:00 (all times CET)
STATE Studio | Hauptstraße 3 in 10827 Berlin
Photo credit © Rene Bade
