Kim? in collaboration with CCA – Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition “Stumbling Through the Uncanny Valley: Sculpture and Self in the Age of Computer Generated Imagery” curated by Chen Tamir at CCA – Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv from July 13 – September 7, 2019. A new iteration of this project will be held at Kim? under the title “For a Nervous Spirit on a Dance Floor (Faktura in the Age of Post Optical.)” The exhibition will be presented in 2020 and will be curated by Zane Onckule.
The starting point of the exhibition is the fact that today we spend so much time looking at screens that show us images created by computers rather than cameras or humans. This new aesthetic filters through our daily lives and gives form to a new mode of visual representation. Following these premises, the exhibition examines the boundaries of this phenomenon through the work of 30 pioneering artists from around the globe. Furthermore, the exhibition title refes to the term “The uncanny valley,” that was coined in the 1970s to describe the unsettling feeling when andoids (humanoid robots) or audio / visual representat ions of people closely resemble humans, but are not fully realistic or convincing. This dissonance is found today in computer-generated imagery (CGI) that now form our visual world and artists today are responding to and deconstruct ing the resultant visual landscape.
The exhibition is conceived as a major spotlight on this medium shift, drawing inspiration for the stream of “Post-Internet Art.” “Post -Internet” does not mean a world after the Internet, but rather work being made in a widely networked world and focusing on the visual culture that is its byproduct, a culture that has become more and more globalized and connected, bringing together artists from different regions of the world, from Asia to Central Europe, from the Middle East to Baltic Countries. These art ists are not only producing art wi th new tools, they are looking deeply at a new world order in which synthet ic images make up a large part of what we take in. In this world, mediated by technology, the physical and the virtual merge, and the Internet complicates how the self and the other meet .
An exhibition opening on July 13 was complimanted by a roundtable discussion “Contemporary Art and New Technology: Love at First Sight, Fatal Attraction, Transitory Relationships?” with exhibiting artists Ruth Patir, Neringa Černiauskaitė (Pakui Hardware), Santa France, and Ronnie Karfiol, moderated by Chen Tamir.
Participating artists: Cory Arcangel, Aleksandra Domanović, Carmi Dror, Adi Fluman, Santa France, Nimrod Gershuni, Nir Harel, Jakub Jansa and Karolína Juříková, Haviv Kaptzon, Ronnie Karfiol, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Daniel Landau in collaboration with Maya Magnat, Oliver Laric, Alicia Mersy, nabbteeri, Katja Novitskova, Pakui Hardware, Eva Papamargariti, Ruth Patir, Andrea Pekárková, Heather Phillipson, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Elinor Salomon, Jacolby Satterwhite, Miri Segal, Timur Si -Qin, Jasmin Vardi, Andrew Norman Wilson, and Lu Yang.
Supported by: Michelle Pollak, the Ostrovsky Family Fund (OFF), ifa –Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and Taboola; additional support has been provided by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Gil Brandes, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, Bundeskanzleramt – the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancel lery of Austria, the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundat ion for the Arts, Tel Aviv, the Czech Center in Tel Aviv and Smartwings.