ifa’s web-based project launches four new artworks
ifa proudly presents four new artworks developed at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) as part of the constantly growing web-based project ARE YOU FOR REAL. During a seminar led by curators Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, a group of artists explored questions around algorithmic systems, which mostly do not depict an “objective” reality.
How do we grasp and interpret what we are seeing and experiencing? Are privileged perspectives becoming more real than others? Who can judge whether something is real? Who is allowed to judge? Can digital space ever be a neutral location?
The participating artists have developed new perspectives and artistic projects reflecting these questions. An augmented-reality video of a mental journey moving between virtual and real worlds. A conversation between three programmed voices as disembodied echoes in digital space, which interweave text, image, and sound to form a speculative reality around their own existence. A web-based questionnaire experience playfully forcing us to give straight binary answers that unveil the absurdities of CAPTCHA requests. And a digital network of fragments from individual histories—visual or textual threads—that serves to visually and conceptually deconstruct linear spacetime, and counteract the ways in which progressive linearity predetermines and flattens our understanding of time, culture, and identity.
Participating artists: Mathias Becker, Ruben S. Bürgam, George Demir, Gertruda Gilyte, Marcel Heise, Sayaka Katsumoto, Zaidda Nursiti Kemal, Yuyen Lin-Woywod, Luïza Luz, Théo Pożoga, Xiaoyu Tang, Andi Teichmann, Dior Thiam.
All projects are currently on display in the very centre of the project’s website, which is designed and developed by Yehwan Song.
Initiated by ifa and curated by Julia Grosse, Paula Nascimento, and Yvette Mutumba, ARE YOU FOR REAL launched in December 2020 and is conceived as a participatory project testing interactive artistic practices. It brings together artists, researchers, filmmakers, writers, and coders to create new works, each offering a different understanding of and approach towards the concept of “reality.” It is about engaging with and visualising the connections between people, thoughts, things, and places that occur through the trading and training of data. It addresses the material and immaterial aspects of the digital, and how both are perceived from the perspectives of various disciplines.
ARE YOU FOR REAL aims to create an international cultural exchange as well as a contemporary co-creative practice of exhibition-making. The artworks produced change over the course of the project, as new artists join and take over, add and react.
Further projects by artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Nushin Yazdani & Can Karaalioglu (feat. Aylin Karabulut, Dounia Hagenauer, Rafiou Bayor, Tiara Roxanne, and Ulla Heinrich) as well as contributors Ibrahim Cissé & Asmaa Jama, João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Ainslee Alem Robson & Kidus Hailesilassie, and Michelle M. Wright can be experienced on the ARE YOU FOR REAL website. More to come soon.
About ifa
ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) is Germany’s oldest intermediary organisation for international cultural relations. It promotes a peaceful and enriching coexistence between people and cultures worldwide. ifa supports artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes, and it acts as a centre of excellence for international cultural relations. It is part of a global network and relies on sustainable, long-term partnerships. It is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
For further information: art@ifa.de / presse@ifa.de
