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Beatrice Loft Schulz, Living Arrangements
# (detail), 2015, emulsion paint, glass beads, handmade paper buckets, tissue paper, polystyrene, marbled paper, packing materials, beading, gauze, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. |
Press Release
Text Mihaela Varzari
ElectroPutere artists in-residence is a program of the Centre for Art Club ElectroPutere developed within the framework of the creative, production and research centre, located in the city of Craiova in southwestern region of Romania.
Established in 2016, the residency program welcomes international artists, curators, thinkers and other practitioners, to undertake research and develop specific projects related to their artistic practice. It takes place over the summer period and it alternates between open call and upon invitation only. Its 2019 edition curated by Mihaela Varzari (RO/UK) brings together the artists Beatrice Loft Schulz (UK), art collective UBERMORGEN (AT/DE) to include its latest member, zthehenk (AT/DE) alias Alexander Zenker and their special guest, Nye Thompson (UK).
Loft Schulz’s practice as an artist, as well as a writer, stands out for its oblique engagement with digitalism via existential anxieties, unloosed by the conundrums of desire, pleasure or the chasing of satisfaction. Her works could be seen as extended conversations on domesticity, forgotten women, or the increasing feminization of the workspace, specific to post 2008 economic crash in the UK. While on the residency, she is thinking about and researching on crafts associated with female labor. According to Jonathan P. Watts commenting on her solo in 2015 at Arcadia Missa Gallery, London, ‘Loft Schulz self-consciously uses weaving to unpick a feminist pre-history of the Internet” (ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL, Dec issue, 2015, p. 270)
UBERMORGEN.COM originally formed by lizvlx & Hans Bernhard, has been experimenting recently with the format of a collective, given the newly added member Zenk the Henk (AT/DE) alias Alexander Zenker. Based between Austria, Switzerland, Germany & USA, the duo’s art practice established within European techno-fine-art avant-garde, coincides with and contribute to the cultural revolution associated with the early stages of the internet in 1994, as well as hacking & techno and basic research & experimental actionism. Their practice developed over the last 25 years, has paid special attention to the possibility of experiencing intimacy and acting upon lust under the omnipotent multi-national corporations, the relationship between capitalism and democracy, global mass media in the information age, addiction, mental heath, and the rising of the Alt-right, all through treating convergent technology as an 'accomplice'. During the residency, the collective, together with British artist Nye Thompson, will work with local engineers towards developing an organism for creating and experiencing horror (film) scenarios for human-machine entities. Already established as pioneers of Net.Art, Marisa Olson refers to UBERMORGEN's work as ‘embodying the true spirit of the hacker, sniffing out potential back doors into situations or networks and exploiting them in the name of creative social commentary’ (https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/mar/19/tactical-transactions/).
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Beatrice Loft Schulz is an artist from London living in Glasgow. Her work uses digital and manual crafts, as well as performance, to articulate relationships between pleasure, labour, and gender. The process of making a work may be triggered by a coincidence, a conversation, or a rock. Most of her recent work has been intentionally private and therapeutic. She sometimes works with other people. The Sticks, with Laura Morrison, was part of Glasgow International in 2018.
She performed with queer musical ensemble Beep as part of the Staying Out Tour (2018), exploring the legacy of section 28. Domestic Melodrama was a film performance, made together with Alice Brooke, and performed at Tramway, as part of the Glasgow Artists Moving Image Festival 2016. To Ailsa Rock was a collaboration with Lindsay McMillan at Kunstraum, London, June 2019.
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UBERMORGEN (AT, lives and works in GR) is an artist duo founded 1995 in Vienna by lizvlx & Hans Bernhard. As part of the digital avant-garde of the 1990s (Net.Art) and spearheads of the digital actionism and digital concept art of the 2000s, UBERMORGEN are representatives of a radical-subversive approach to data and matter, as well as to institutions and markets. UBERMORGEN own more than 175 own websites/domains. Their projects have been featured in over 3000 news reports and art reviews and CNN called them 'Maverick Austrian Business People' whereas the NY Times called their work 'simply brilliant'. UBERMORGEN have shown their work at the Centre Pompidou, the MoMA/PS1, the Sydney Biennale, the MACBA Barcelona, the New Museum New York, SFMoma, the ICC Tokyo and the Gwangju Biennale, and were commissioned by Serpentine Galleries (Ziron) and the Whitney Museum (Clickistan). UBERMORGEN were awarded the Swiss Art Award, ARCO Beep Award, Ars Electronica Award, Transmediale Award and the glorious IBM Award. Their main influences are Rammstein, Samantha Fox, XXXTentacion and Pixibücher, Olanzapine & LSD, Kentucky Fried Chicken's Coconut Shrimp Deluxe and Viennese Actionism.
http://ubermorgen.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermorgen
http://ubermorgen.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermorgen
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Nye Thompson (UK) is an artist turned software designer turned artist. She creates data-generating artist software systems to explore the impact of new technology paradigms. Her recent creation The Seeker is a machine entity that travels the world virtually - looking through compromised security cameras and describing what it sees.
She has exhibited around UK, Europe and the Far East, including Tate Modern, The Barbican, The V&A, ZKM Karlsruhe and The Lowry. Her first solo show Backdoored.io - described by C4 News as “too controversial to broadcast”-became global clickbait and triggered an international government complaint. Her work has been featured on BBC, C4, CNN Hong Kong, the Guardian and Wired, and was recently guest presenter on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Art of Now: Surveillance’. She was the recipient of an Arts Council England G4A award in 2017, a British Council/ACE travel award in 2018, and an Arts Council England Projects Grant award in 2019. She was a Lumen Prize 2018 finalist.
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zthehenk (b. 1988, DE/GR) alias Alexander Zenker lives and works in Leipzig, Cologne and Vienna. His main interest evolves around psychological regulatory systems and around identity and control within logical game and advertisement environments. His most prominent Installation 'Schaltkreis – Alle unter einem Ton’ is an immersive interactive cybernetic organism. He´s exploring fields between being individual and collective.
Zenker creates gamedesigns and organizes tribe-building parties in Leipzig and he is part of the ‘Keine Fische aber Grethen’(no fish but bones) collective. He holds a diploma in visual communication from the University of Kassel, College of Art (Kunsthochschule Kassel). Since 2015 Zenker assists the artist duo UBERMORGEN in their global ventures dealing with psychopathologies (no-limit.org, 2015) and the Alt Right (Binary Primitivism, 2016-)
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Mihaela Varzari (RO/UK) is an independent curator and a PhD candidate in History of Art at University of Kent, where she focuses on artist collectives emerging around 1994 dedicated to employing the internet as an artistic medium. Her research makes use of narcissism, as it has been theorized in psychoanalysis, and political economy, as expressed by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s specific use of proletarianisation.
She has previously studied at Birkbeck and Goldsmith Colleges between 2009 and 2015. In the exhibitions and events she curated over the years, she has worked with artists like Liliana Basarab (RO), Ziad Antar (LB) and Heath Bunting (UK). In 2008 she has started publishing art criticism texts for Revista ARTA (Bucharest), thisistomorrow (London), IDEA arts+society (Cluj), as well as a series of catalogue essays. Her future projects during 2020 include an extensive group show at Studio3 Gallery, Canterbury centered around algorithms and poetry, and guest writer in residence at Murree Artist Residency, outside Lahore.
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Centre for Contemporary Culture Club Electroputere, Craiova, Romania is a non-profit organization. Founded in 2009 by Adrian Bojenoiu and Alexandru Niculescu, CEP is devoted to establishing close cooperation between artists, curators, researchers, and other cultural actors through interdisciplinary programs and residencies. The center's activity focuses on producing and researching contemporary cultural manifestations. CEP promotes especially alternative art, new creative media, multiculturalism and interdisciplinary, attempting to create connections between the local context and the international cultural environment. Since 2009, CEP has developed various cultural projects based on a structure of programs, including artistic production and exhibitions, curatorial and artistic research, book publishing and conferences.
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Cultural project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.
Supported by: AFCN, British Council, Marin Sorescu National Theatre
Media Parteners: Zeppelin, Revista ARTA
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