Spatial Affairs

The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art presents the physical and digital exhibition Spatial Affairs and HyMEx, a two-day symposium that both seek to engage with a contemporary shift largely attributable to the rapid development and ubiquitous presence of computation and information technology.

Spatial Affairs
Questioning the inner consistency of space, its philosophical and ontological status, its attachment and relationship to reality, has long been a latent undercurrent in the visual arts. This occasionally passionate, other times rather secretive attachment to such ontological affairs may have caused strong feelings in certain betrayed parties—narrative, for example—yet the relationship has proved to have a persistent hold.

If its termination is unthinkable, questioning around space and its entanglement with reality has also been continually reframed by the proliferation of immaterial spheres that have become legitimate parallel dimensions of our perception, expression, experience, knowledge, communication, and analysis. With the arrival of generative imagery, reflecting on this only becomes more pertinent.

The exhibition Spatial Affairs explores artistic reactions to these matters, including pre- and post-computational approaches from the early avant-garde through conceptualism to very recent works of art. In Spatial Affairs the binary relationship between the actual and the virtual, the real and the possible, evaporates into a multidimensionality in which the only betrayed party is dualism, leading to exploded axes of complex and multiplied notions of space.

Spatial Affairs. Worlding is an exploratory online environment, a virtual "multi-user" exhibition populated by crawling artworks, where visitor's avatars are mingling with moving bodies of exhibited net.art and browser-based projects. The platform is designed by The Rodina. Soundscape by Enrico Boccioletti.

Morehshin Allahyari, Andreas Angelidakis, Carola Bonfili, Adam Broomberg & Guy De Lancey & Brian O’Doherty, Petra Cortright, Agnes Denes, Aleksandra Domanović, Louise Drulhe, Wojciech Fangor, Stanislav Filko, Lucio Fontana, Dora García, Sam Ghantous, János Gulyás, Hans Hollein, Lauren Huret, Jodi, Hiroshi Kawano, Katarzyna Kobro, Alicja Kwade, Oliver Laric, Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain, Jan Robert Leegte, Lou Cantor, Stano Masár, Cildo Meireles, Rosa Menkman, Metahaven, Imre Nagy, Georg Nees, Robert Olawuyi, Gyula Pauer, Goran Petercol, Sascha Pohflepp & Alessia Nigretti & Matthew Lutz, Àngels Ribé, The Rodina, Rafaël Rozendaal, Jeffrey Shaw, Andrej Škufca, Károly Tamkó Sirató, Viktor Timofeev, Unrated/Besorolás Alatt, Gyula Várnai

Curators: Giulia Bini, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
Assistant Curators: Jan Elantkowski, Fruzsina Feigl

Online exhibition opening: April 29, 6pm, GMT+1 (CEST)

In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue documents both the physical and digital exhibition, with AR extensions by Transbooking, theoretical contributions by featured authors, as well as selected manifestos.

HyMEx: Hybrid Museum Experience online symposium
May 6–7, 2021

The museum entity is currently undergoing a transmogrifying process: HyMEx is an online symposium that aims at deconstructing and reconstructing the hybrid museum experience through the involvement of pluridisciplinary angles. The two-day live programme symposium will bring together leading researchers, scholars in digital and experimental museology, curatorial practice, collection care, as well as researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to exchange views on challenging situations and latest innovations in the field of hybrid museum experiences, with a focus on contemporary art. 

Keynote speakers: Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art | The New School), Boris Groys (New York University)

Detailed speakers’ list: hymex2021.ludwigmuseum.hu  

To attend, please register: hymex.online

No registration fee is required. The symposium is in English, scheduled on GMT+2 (CEST) time.
 

HyMEx Project Manager: Borbála Kálmán (Ludwig Museum)m, hymex@ludwigmuseum.hu
Concept of HyMEx: Borbála Kálmán, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM | Hertz-Lab)
 

Spatial Affairs and HyMEx are conceived as part of the international cooperation project BEYOND MATTER: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, in collaboration with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Ludwig Museum – Contemporary Museum of Art, Budapest with the contribution of the Aalto University, Helsinki. Spatial Affairs. Worlding is co-produced by ZKM | Karlsruhe and EPFL Pavilions.

Press contact:
Gabriella Rothman, rothman.gabriella@ludwigmuseum.hu