Hatje Cantz Catalogue Essay (September 2020): DECEPTION. i-DESIRE. RADICAL OPTIMISM. Apparatus 22 – art collective

 

DECEPTION. i-DESIRE. RADICAL OPTIMISM

Apparatus 22 – art collective

Text by Mihaela Varzari

to be published by Hatje Cantz

Distinctly eclectic, fractured, non-heterogeneous and multidisciplinary in their approach, Apparatus 22 – a collective comprising artists Maria Farcaș, Erika Olea, Dragoș Olea and the late Ioana Nemeș (1979-2011) – employ a limitless range of everyday materials to create installations, performances, workshops, sculptures, and sound and text-based pieces, as well as interventions in public spaces. Their mishmash of practices and competing visions suggest an affinity with the historic avant-garde, which did not operate with stable barriers between visual art, cinema, music, theatre, costume design or fashion. The group were first brought together in Bucharest by a shared interest in experimental fashion during the early 2000s, before they formed the collective in 2011 as a result of a fortuitous encounter while on an IASPIS residency in Stockholm. In recent years, all its members have lived at different times in Bucharest, Turin and Brussels. With no background in the arts, Apparatus 22 came together motivated by an ethical drive to convey into art their own life experiences as they unfold. Their shared sensibility, informed by critical thinking, places them in the position of the hopeful pessimist, holding to a “radical optimism” (as they label it), which stems from vigilance in the face of the contradictions within an art system immersed in the logic of global late capitalism [i]. 

Vilem Flusser’s hypothesis on history after photography – that its goal is to become an image – resonates with the text-based works produced by Apparatus 22 for their solo show Several Laws: The Elastic Test in 2016. Writing on media and technology in the 1980s, Flusser seems to have anticipated many tropes of our era, which is dominated at all levels by the rampant acceleration of the internet. It is an era especially associated with fake news, which has arisen since Facebook allowed algorithms to select and publish news on its website in 2017[ii]. Such excessive mechanisms of self-deception specific to twenty-first century cognitive capitalism appear to inform Apparatus 22’s text-based works. Destined to engage with the post-internet era,[iii] they consist of condensed poetic texts, not lacking in wry humor. This series are impregnated by nostalgia for unfulfilled desires, which might be considered projections of the self as mediated by intelligent screens. The texts are tattooed on multi-colored canvases made out of stretched, untreated vellum, whose smell fills the entire exhibition space because animal skin, whilst such a versatile material for fashion in the form of leather, retains its olfactory quality when processed for use as parchment. This material, closely associated with the origins of inscription, places the art object at the intersection of a combative relationship between text and body. In the Marxian mode of wanting to change the world rather than merely interpret it, the collective decided to introduce this series of art works into the intellectual and art market with great care, showing caution as to how the works’ financial potential might affect what they wished to criticize; the collective chose their collectors and did not go for the highest bidder. 

Apparatus 22, UNTITLED (5), from SEVERAL LAWS. THE ELASTIC TEST series - exhibition view

object (leather, laser inscription, hand dyed in grey) | 2016 | 100x140 cm; image courtesy of the artists and GALLLERIAPIÙ, Bologna; photo by Stefano Maniero

Positive Tension (in the air) (2012) is a series of five participatory performances that focus on generating conversations with participants. It has since attracted multiple invitations from various cultural institutions across Europe, as well as within Romania itself. In its various permutations this ongoing work includes extensive questions on curating. What could be the biggest pieces of confetti in the world poses questions concerning the role of fashion in consumerism, written on large round multicolored pieces of paper. Thrown in the air in carnivalesque style, the confetti reclaimed for a brief moment the public square of the Museumsquartier in Vienna, for which the performances were initially conceived.

 

Apparatus 22, Positive Tension (In the Air) performance (in a series of 5 performances in public space) MuseumsQuartier Wien, Austria | 2012; image courtesy of the artists; photo by Laura Paraschiv

 

Apparatus 22 - Art is Work (drawing); Drawing |2012; image courtesy of the artists, MUMOK Vienna and Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest

The universal TuTa garment designed by the artist Thayah 4[i] formed the basis for the ongoing project Art is work (2011) 5[ii]. The initial 1919 design resembled a jumpsuit, similar to a worker’s uniform, whose pattern was made available to all in an attempt to unburden clothes from their social status by making them open-source. One hundred or so years later, the same cutting pattern is made available to download by Apparatus 22, who also manufacture the jumpsuits to be given away to artists for immediate wear at art openings. In their own words: “the plain uniform, available to all is an impossible position from which to start thinking about a new project”. It is an utopian ideal, which generates new attitudes vis-à-vis creation, production, distribution, reception and consumption, as well as towards the immaterial labor of late capitalism. Labor conditions are also examined in a quaint way by engaging with the life of magic, in Morpheus Buyback (2011), an elaborate performance and installation, complete with music, furs, seating areas, stories, fears, and desires. The inhabitants of Graz are asked to partake in a gift transaction, specific to archaic tradition, by retelling their nightmares in exchange for good luck charms, customized on the spot. 

 

 

Apparatus 22 - Morpheus Buyback; Installation & performance Drodesera Festival, Italy | 2012; image courtesy of the artists; photo by Alessandro Sala

 

Fashion used as catalyst for reflection and investigation allows Apparatus 22 to delve into a common imaginaire of pre-Christian tradition associated with myths and folklore, which is combined with their outright discontent with the Orthodox Church in Romania, invested as it has been with infinite political influence after the events of 1989. The critique of surplus value as it is produced by the art market maintains the group’s allegiance to utopian ideals, and sustains their particular appeal to political struggle in the related quest to bypass naïve and formulaic anti-capitalist attitudes.

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[i] In its variety of instantiations, capitalism produced in Romania after the events of ’89 “nepotistic capitalism”, a self-explanatory term first coined by the former Romanian president Ion Iliescu (1989-1996 and 2000-2004). The Romanian-born writer and political dissident Dumitru Țepeneag (b. 1937), who lives in France, discussed this in his book Capitalism de cumetrie (Nepotistic capitalism) (Iași: Polirom, 2007).

 

[ii] Philip Mirowski, ‘The “logic” of Fake News’, 27 October 2017. At: http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/logic-fake-news-philip-mirowski-28th-october [accessed 1 June 2019].

 

³ “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by the German artist Marisa Olson. See: “On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Doghouse” at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/post-internet-cities/140712/on-the-internet-no-one-knows-you-re-a-doghouse [accessed 15 May 2019].

4 [i] Thayaht, the alias of Ernesto Michahelles (1893-1959), was an artist and designer and a pioneer of the Italian Futurist movement in the 1920s.

5 [ii] Art is work by Apparatus 22 was part of the exhibition entitled Situated Knowledge: I follow rivers of thoughts, curated by Anca Mihuleț with the invited Romanian artist Olivia Mihalțeanu, and held at the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research in Venice from 15 September to

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Review by Mihaela Varzari (November 2020): Praneet Soi: Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, at The Mosaic Rooms, London

Praneet Soi: Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley

The Mosaic Rooms Art Space, London

27 September - 7 December 2019

Review by Mihaela Varzari

published with: http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/praneet-soi-anamorphosis-notes-from-palestine-winter-in-the-kashmir-valley

The exhibition ‘Anamorphosis: Notes from Palestine, winter in the Kashmir Valley’ resembles a travelling diary written by a flâneur-cum-researcher, into territories and histories familiar to the artist Praneet Soi. In response to The Mosaic Rooms commission, the artist decided to travel during June 2019 across the Occupied Palestinian Territories including Golan Heights, Jericho and Hebron, and in Israel, in Haifa, Akka andTel Aviv. His aim, the artist states, was ‘to understand productivity and entrepreneurship for people in Palestine’, as was the case in his previous body of work, ‘Notes on Labour’. While working on this exhibition, in August the Modi government revoked Indian-administered Kashmir’s autonomy status. The Kashmiri have been in the middle of three wars between India and Pakistan since the British partition of the region in 1947. Like Palestinians, Kashmiris are treated as second-class citizens in their own land which determined Soi to incorporate local histories from both regions and influences his exhibition of ongoing work with craftsmen in Kashmir.

 Praneet Soi- Anamorphosis- Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, The Mosaic Rooms Website - https- mosaicrooms.org.  Credit - Courtesy The Mosaic Rooms. Photo- Andy Stagg

Women street vendors, children attending a fair, young people diving in Akka, an Arabic city situated in Israeli territory and a small business owner populate the film ‘Yalla Yasmeen!’ (2019), which takes the form of a visual essay aimed at registering the minutia of everyday life in the Occupied Territories and Israel. Murad, a hardware store owner just outside of Salfeet in the West Bank, who sells to customers from settlements, talks about ‘the desire of some of them to start a dialogue’. When politics fail, a family business can become a social space for interaction and engagement. Displacement affects all people encountered by Soi in his journey and he mentions how families in his native India return to their hometowns to ensure their children stay connected to the culture. The camera looks at the natural landscape intensely and lingers on an old tree which he considers it to be ‘a witness to civilizations and empires’, creating a slight affectation since the image itself tells enough.

 

Praneet Soi- Anamorphosis- Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, The Mosaic Rooms Website - https- mosaicrooms.org  Credit - Courtesy The Mosaic Rooms. Photo- Andy Stagg

Some of the people, plants and natural landscapes featuring in the film from the first room, gain a life of their own and are further immortalised by becoming protagonists in Soi’s drawings presented in the second. Some of these works use silverpoint, a medieval drawing technique that adds to Soi’s specific interest in crafts and responds to his long interest in labour conditions. Almost all his sketching of the surrounding landscapes subtly depicts frontiers and fences. The experience of understanding borders as consequences of illegal occupation, as frustration and obfuscation informs the exhibition design, using a structure allowing points of visibility and sections that are blocked off. This play with ellipsis has been part of Soi’s repertoire for some time through his engagement with anamorphosis. This artistic technique perfected by Hans Holbein the Younger in his ‘The Ambassadors’ (c. 1533) experiments with optics and perspective to create a detail in the painting, namely a human skull, only visible from certain angles. Used as a metaphor, it allows Soi to throw back to the spectator the responsibility for engaging with some uncomfortable states of affairs.

 

 Praneet Soi- Anamorphosis- Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, The Mosaic Rooms Website - https- mosaicrooms.org  Credit - Courtesy The Mosaic Rooms. Photo- Andy Stagg

The third room is dedicated to Soi’s collaboration with Fayaz Jan, a master craftsman interested in exploring Sufi history in Kashmir. The tiles presented are made of papier-mâché, a medieval technique imported from Iran, and they feature local, floral motifs. The walls are written on with pieces of legislation from 1948, are reminder of the lack for self-determination on behalf of the Kashmiri.

Soi’s oblique portrayal of social unrest and displacement as a result of occupation brings to the fore the inherent violent nature of representation with all its political entanglements. The incorporation of his artistic research surpasses a well-rehearsed self-curated exhibition and allows new existences for the sketches and drawings.

Praneet Soi- Anamorphosis- Notes from Palestine, Winter in the Kashmir Valley, The Mosaic Rooms Website - https- mosaicrooms.org  Credit - Courtesy The Mosaic Rooms. Photo- Andy Stagg

Post-adevăr-uri (mai, 2020): Liliana Basarab, Mihaela Varzari, Alina Șerban, Robert Bălan, Dragoș Alexandrescu, Vlad Basalici, Livia Ștefan, Carmen Lopăzan

 

Liliana Basarab, Mihaela Varzari, Alina Șerban, Robert Bălan, Dragoș Alexandrescu, Vlad Basalici, Livia Ștefan, Carmen Lopăzan

Post-adevăr-uri este un proiect colaborativ transdisciplinar inițiat de artista vizuală Liliana Basarab, împreună cu Mihaela Varzari (curatoare), Dragoș Alexandrescu (artist vizual), Alina Șerban (actriță), Robert Bălan (regizor, performer), Vlad Basalici (artist vizual), Livia Ștefan (poetă/performer) și Carmen Lopăzan (actriță). Proiectul constă într-o serie de discuții online între participanți, găzduite de Liliana Basarab, urmate de producerea unui material video. Aceste discuții, definite după materialele informative oferite de Mihaela Varzari, au dezbătut implicațiile politice ale epocii „post-adevărului”, urmate de producerea unui performance de către fiecare participant, unde singura condiție este respectarea regulilor jocului de mimă, pentru a transpune în limbaj corporal acest concept. Materialul video final însumează cinci performance-uri ce au la bază conceptul de „post-adevăr”.

 

 

Post-adevăr-uri este unul dintre proiectele castigatoare, ca urmare a initiativei Artists Rooms, proiect menit sa sustina artistii independenti din Romania, pe durata pandemiei 2020. Artists Rooms este un proiect cultural inițiat de Fundația9 cu sprijinul partenerului fondator, BRD Groupe Societe Generale, co-finanțat de AFCN și desfășurat în parteneriat cu Primăria Municipiului București prin Centrul Cultural Expo Art și Anagrama.

 

Liliana Basarab, Vrajitoare (2020), colaj textile.

Curatorial essay. Artists in-residence 2019: Beatrice Loft Schulz (UK), artistic duo UBERMORGEN (AT/CH/US) together with Nye Thompson (UK), plus ztheheng (DE) alias Alexander Zenker. Curator in residence: Mihaela Varzari

ElectroPutere AIR 2019 

Craiova
Romania


From Male gaze to Machine Gaze

Curatorial essay by Mihaela Varzari

My choice to invite Beatrice Loft Schulz, the artist duo UBERMORGEN together with Nye Thompson and their collaborator ztheheng (the alias of Alexander Zenker), as artists in residence, stems from my current research around issues related to cognitive capitalism and feminist studies as possible avenues to engage with contemporary art production. In the words of the media theorist Yuk Hui, ‘there is the need of turning technology into a support for culture’[1], of moving away from following technology’s pursuit towards perfection. This perfection, this nightmare of absolutism supported by the rationality on which the liberal or neoliberal state is built, has been also challenged by feminism, whose questions haunt ethics and re-write history. As Julia Kristeva observed ‘For the two thousand and five hundred years that ethics has existed, the feminine has been rejected from the sphere of ethics: it is not a subject, at most it is an object, if only!’^[2]. 

Both artistic visions coming from Loft Schulz and Thompson & UBERMORGEN use technology as a filter, and while the former situates herself in the wider post-internet cultural dimension, the latter have been using the internet as a medium from its inception. Their research themes, developed during the 30 days spent in Craiova and Bucharest, are quite different, as well as their respective outcomes where the history of technology includes both the weaving loom and the manufactured network of robots becoming its own organism. 

Loft Schulz’s practice brings to the fore an existential dimension rooted in embodied feminism, which collides with her interest in unpicking the contemporary psyche molded by rampant technological development. She works across predominantly performance and text, as well as sculptural assemblages and crafts, such as weaving. Many of her works have as their starting point major historical female figures, such as Joan of Arc, or the unearthing of marginalized ones, like Beatrice de Dia, one of the best known of the Trobairitz during 11th to the 13th century in France. Her research into the history of computer programming, beginning with the historically neglected British mathematician Ada Lovelace in the first half of the 19th Century, reveals her practice to be concerned with women’s discarded contribution to technological development.

Beatrice Loft Schulz, The Story of Joan of Arc, 2014. Documentation of a performance for Rematerialising Feminism, ICA London. 

Courtesy: the artist

The more recent link between weaving and coding informs her thinking on crafts while it has not been directly expressed. Her textile-based piece Rain (2017) was made while looking at the sky  and trying to capture its constant movement.  During the residency, Beatrice gathered information on weaving techniques, visited workshops across the country, which included traditional looms, had meetings with conservationists and museum curators, and produced a small tapestry on a miniature loom. As a consequence of this research, Beatrice will spend one year weaving on a loom one single tapestry in her Glasgow studio. During this time, which may be seen as an extended performance with no audience, the activity’s monotony of this slow medium will allow Loft Schulz’s attention to fall upon the changing of seasons, her growing older, her moods and how they may be affected by working with certain colours. 

Weaving, this quintessential folk tradition developed in pre-history, asserts itself within contemporary art and technology through Loft Schulz’s refusal to justify or argue for its significance to our contemporary moment; it is a technology as significant as (if not more so) than the coding languages of today. Weaving (which according to Sigmund Freud had been invented by women alone) which surprisingly enough still continues to challenge the traditional hierarchical boundaries between craft and fine art, and in Loft Schulz’s practice is further tied to the developmental history of the internet. This need for a reappraisal of technologies history by Loft Schulz not only addresses the need to balance the history books to include significant but neglected women, but moreover wants to overturn the existing historical paradigm, forcing the art institutions to undergo internal and structural changes. It is not enough to exhibit more women if the structures which sidelined them in the first place are not themselves transformed.

Beatrice Loft Schulz, Rain, 2017,  yarn on rug canvas. Courtesy: the artist

Without taking away the complexity and the various nuances of the long-standing practice of UBERMORGEN, I suggest as a possible point of entry the aesthetics of the German hard rock band Rammstein. It has been argued already that their tactic to undermine fascism from within is through parodic re-enactment. They absorb the mannerism of the enemy, adopting all the seductive trappings and symbols of state power, then exaggerate them. During recent years UBERMORGEN's has turned towards the Alternative-Right, ideologically linked to the current trend of nationalism, anti-migration and anti-feminism in the West. The potent element of fear, the binding agent for these irrational attitudes, has been further explored during the residency, with the project UNINVITED, an ongoing collaboration with artist Nye Thompson, an artist whose practice is concerned with the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence, global surveillance capitalism in relation to the age of Big Data, or national borders and identity formation in the UK. 

Her presence within the residency as a guest of UBERMORGEN and by extension of the residency programme, goes back to her project BACKDOORED (2016-2017) based on a vast archive of screenshots obtained though compromised surveillance online cameras. This project, aimed at tackling the issue of complicity in relation to data privacy, also sets the scene for her partnership with UBERMORGEN, which began in 2018. UNINVITED was conceived as a horror film for machines and it featured its first iteration at Wei-Ling Gallery in Malaysia during 2019. It was further developed during the residency with the help of engineers from Bucharest and the final film is expected to complete in 2022, with planned installations in London and Craiova during 2020. 

Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN,  UNINVITED, 2019. Exhibition view- Paralogical Machines, Wei-Ling Gallery,  Kuala Lumpur. Courtesy: the artists

The installation is comprised of a robot running on a dolly, equipped with movement sensors and a projector showing images from an archive of  surveillance footage; frequently lo-fi representations of a mixture of domestic, private and public spheres. They evoke the sense of the uncanny, described by Freud as familiar and alien at the same time, just like the sight of a corpse, or indeed a robot. The sound and the editing style of the video, reminiscent of lower end of B movies, adds an eerie and charged backdrop to his unsettling drama. The taxonomy employed for classifying the images seeks to mimic that of an algorithm-based selection process, which brings to the fore a hot subject; how to understand and represent categorization in the 3^rd millennium through the lens of accumulated data.

The robot was initially designed to react to a human audience, though after having heard of the existence of unused, underground spaces in the House of the People, also known as Ceaușescu’s Palace in Bucharest, the artists reconsidered human participation. The team are considering an online broadcast, which would exclude any actual live audience members interacting with the robot and its sensors, thus allowing the machines to become, according to the artists, ‘the performers, audience, content providers and commentators’. Machines spying on other machines contribute to generating Big Data, this insatiable, ever-growing monster with its own spiralling logic; which no-one knows how to deal with yet. Horror takes place right now, it’s called the reduction of the individual to set of data sold for profit. It seems to me, that within today’s accelerated humanity, where we are mere minds mined for data, and governed by cyber-spying, the fear of machines taking over humans is being replaced by humans becoming more like machines.

The project UNINVITED channels fear, a feeling equally captured by the horror films, as well as by political propaganda, through a restrained, cold and unsentimental aesthetic specific to net.art. Taking my lead from Gilbert Simondon, this project brings human experiences into the realm of machine-aesthetics, where the emphasis is on the functional and operational in order to challenge the human-machine dichotomy. More recent discussions within the team have been focusing on the possibility of having more than one robot connected through the cloud, as well as considering the whole project as one single organism through the animal-machine relationship. The folklore element is present in this project through its relationship to horror film genre, founded in the oral tradition of sharing and passing on tales and legends and it could provide a different entry point into unpicking UNINVITED. 

Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN.  UNINVITED Organism Schematic (Network View), 2019. Courtesy: the artists

Both projects propose critical stances to technological development seen through pathologies ushered in by the rapid development of the internet, by addressing the feminization of the workspace, the materiality of the medium of weaving and its relationship to feminism, surveillance capitalism and machine aesthetics. Both projects react to the local context. Loft Schulz embraced manual weaving as a medium, inspired by the Romanian folklore, which is still present in this late industrialized country, whilst UBERMORGEN and Thompson reacted to the deserted underground spaces which once belonged to a dictator. The latter’s involvement with folk tradition emerges more obliquely through an appropriation of the aesthetics of the horror film genre, itself arguably a hyperbolisation of oral tradition. 

My own critical inquiry takes me down the path of engaging with artistic practices, which keep away from simply renouncing modern technology as intrinsically bad and the other dogmatically endorsing it. UNINVITED present a dystopian version of technology, which if not managed well may prove that there is nothing intelligent about artificial intelligence. Loft Schulz is more  redemptive, but this optimism requires a total restructuring, radical in its essence, which  when placed alongside UBERMORGEN and Thompson’s work could be perhaps read as science fiction itself – she is describing a reality that has not yet come into being UNINVITED’s brand of science fiction is posited as our reality, thus the creeping horror of it all.  Nevertheless, neither project neatly wraps up the questions they pose. The lack of human audience in both works adds to the multiple interpretations to be further explored.

This AIR edition based on exploration and production only, offered the artists the opportunity to re-think or develop some of their working themes, or earlier projects, and engage with the local histories and the social and cultural landscape of Romania. The two projects almost diametrically opposed and pointing into different directions, one to a neglected past, one to a dystopian future, makes me wonder about the teleological directions of the contemporary moment in art and the elusiveness of anticipating new directions.

[1] Hui, Y.(2016).  On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[2] Kristeva, J. (1987c). Tales of Love. New York, New York: Columbia University Press.

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This cultural project is co-financed by NCFA (National Cultural Fund Administration) of  Romania and Club Electroputere. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the NCFA and it 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, Teatrul National Marin Sorescu

Media Parteners: Zeppelin, Revista ARTA

PRESS RELEASE // C U N T / Artist: Beatrice Loft Schulz // Curator: Mihaela Varzari // Opening: Sat 28 Sept / 6 PM / 2-25 Oct 2019

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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 shown at Kunstraum, London in June 2019.

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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 feminist studies, 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, Marin Sorescu National Theatre 

Media Parteners: Zeppelin, Revista ARTA

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Exhibition view photos. Photo © Electro Putere Gallery

Press Release: Beatrice Loft Schulz, UBERMORGEN, Nye Thompson, Zenk the Henk / Curator: Mihaela Varzari

 

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

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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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