Tag: #coronavirus

Social distancing – Week 11: The state of our lives

 

In the past weeks, we saw people dying from a new virus. We locked ourselves in our homes and started wearing masks to protect us and our beloved. We started working remotely, and everything went digital. We met on Zoom and had virtual dinners with friends. Exhibitions and art fairs have been converted into VR. Private views happened online. Museum collections have been made accessible to the public online. Gallerists, artists, critics, and collectors talked on live streams. Podcasts and online Yoga sessions boomed. Many of us lost their jobs. Many of us have been furloughed. Nearly two million people claimed Universal Credits. Air transport has been stopped, and planes grounded. We pledged for the universal basic income. We mourned for the killing of George Floyd.  “Please, I can’t breathe” reached the ears of the whole world but the ones of his murderer, the policeman Derek Chauvin. Rage stirred up our hearts. We flooded the streets to protest in support on BLM and against systemic racism. We tore down colonialist monuments of slave-traders. City officials boarded up monuments in London to prevent further damage. Far-right supporters arrived in London to counteract BLM protesters. Protecting British monuments was their pretence. “All lives can’t matter until black lives matter”. We have been alone but together. Parks are full of litter and oceans of plastic. Climate change and global warming are still happening. Our planet is still in an emergency. Now we are preparing for the reopening. Lockdown rules have been relaxed. From Monday, some art Galleries will open again by appointment only. We keep using masks. Planes are still mainly grounded. Anyone entering the UK has to self-isolate for 14 days. France closes its borders to Britons reciprocally. BA, Easy Jet, and Ryanair combined to sue the government over the quarantine. The country GDP reached its lowest record in history (-20% in April). Recession is knocking. Brexit trade meetings are ongoing. Turmoil is the state in which we live.

Social distancing – Week 10: Days of Protests

On Monday 25th May in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the policeman Derek Chauvin, held his knee to George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd kept repeating “Please, I can’t breathe”, but Chauvin did not listen to the imploring man. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was dead.

The murder has been filmed, and its video went viral straight away, stirring the anger of thousands. Soon, enraged protests sparked in Minneapolis and in response, president Trump threatened black American citizens with barbaric murdering by tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” As a result, protests took place all over the country, also counting several episodes of violence. In an attempt to counteract violence in the streets, on Monday 1st June, NY Mayor De Blasio, announced a citywide curfew (the last curfew was put in place in 1943). Since the curfew announcement, protesters got together against police brutality and systemic racism worldwide.

The makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer
MINNEAPOLIS , MINNESOTA – MAY 31: The mural and makeshift memorial outside Cup Foods where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on Sunday, May 31, 2020 in Minneapolis , Minnesota. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The art world rose its voice in solidarity with rioters too. Alongside joining demonstrations, artists have been painting murals in Floyd’s memory in the US, Europe, Syria, and elsewhere. Email inboxes flooded with newsletters stating the organisation’s support to the Black Lives Matter movement. Emails which often include tips on how to safely protest amidst the threat of Coronavirus.

In Minnesota, the Walker art Centre and the Minneapolis Institute of Art have pledged to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department by stopping hiring police at their events. Collecteurs – the collective museum of private collections based in NYC – converted its Instagram profile into a live archive of the BLM movement. Their Instagram page showcases historical images related to black people long-lasting fight for their rights as well as real-time footage of current protests. Cultural organisations from around the world are campaigning in support of BLM. These vastly share bail funds and reading lists to inform their audience while providing the tools to help protesters.

All these are just some example of an overall soft contribution. However, hopefully these small actions will lead to a more radical change within an industry which is still predominantly white.

Raised fist – black power symbol – image taken from Pinterest

 

Social distancing – Week 9: “Piper in the Woods”, an online exhibition

After having visited tons of online exhibitions and VR rooms, I found one show that finally made use of the digital space acknowledging its dimensional characteristics. “Piper in the Woods” (live until 15th June 2020) is an online group show responding to the pandemic organized by the art platform Isthisit?, curated by its founder and director Bob Bicknell-Knight.

Piper in the Woods screenshot
Piper in the Woods screenshot

The exhibition presents five videos and one sound work by five artists – John Butler, Stine Deja, Emily Mulenga, Tamsin Snow and Petra Szemán. The works look at possible futures in which technology and AI impact and govern our daily lives. As Bicknell-Knight explains in the press release, the show takes its title from the 1953 short story of the same name by Philip K Dick.

Imagination_195302_cover taken from Piper in the Woods - Wikipedia
Imagination_cover taken from Piper in the Woods – Wikipedia

The science-fiction plot sees an army doctor, Henry Harris, examining the strange behaviour of several soldiers who, after returning to the Earth from an expedition to asteroid Y-3, claim they have become plants. With this belief, the soldiers stopped working and passed their time in the sun, like plants, meditating about how work is unnecessary and even harmful for our well-being. The story is part of the display and can be read on the left of the screen while navigating the exhibition space.

The videos are arranged to use the space horizontally rather than vertically. Thus, the exhibition occupies a space that goes outside the borders of a standard web page. The background is white mimicking both the white cube gallery space and, as the curator explains, “the soldiers’ deviation from the norm and into the unknown forest.” The only environmental feature in the room is given by the loop of “Last Resort” (2020), a sound work by Stine Deja which accompanies the visitor’s journey by offering the acoustic ambience.

The artists’ works tell the stories of individuals who, in a hi-tech world, spend their lives in solitude with no or little interaction with other humans. “Piper in the Woods” introduces us to a series of unappealing scenarios which, in this time, seems more likely to happen than ever before.

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Social distancing – Week 7: Home Cooking – “Collective Intelligence” a collectively owned artwork

Home Cooking, “a digest of new artworks, scores, events, and actions started during this time of suspension.” Its first post on Instagram is dated 22nd March 2020, the day the lockdown started in London. The project was kicked off by the British artist Marianna Simnett together with peer artists and friends. Home Cooking is a platform where artists, creatives, and thinkers from around the world share their ideas and projects. How? Through Instagram posts and takeovers, Livestream interventions, conversations, and interviews on Instagram, Twitch, and Zoom. Art is the beating heart of the project.

It is though Home Cooking that I learnt about the new typeface, “Emergence”, created by artist Agnieszka Kurant in collaboration with designer and typographer Radim Pesko. The font is the result of a couple of years of work during time which the duo has been collecting and analysing 26 different typefaces. Like in a puzzle, “Emergence” has been made by assembling small parts obtained by breaking down the structure of the 26 fonts. On Friday 24th April, during the project presentation in Home Cooking, Kurant and Pesko unveiled the first version of “Emergence.”  They explained that the font could take on different shapes and change by diversifying the assembling combinations. After the initial presentation, Kurant launched an open call inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to participate by submitting a sentence that reflects on the Coronacene. The gathered sentences will form a collectively owned artwork, “Collective Intelligence.”  The open call announces that the collectively made work would be auctioned so to generate revenue to be shared among the artwork’s authors.

From Home Cooking – 12th May 2020:

Dear friends and friends of friends,
A few days ago on Home Cooking, we launched a collective-intelligence artwork that I developed together with the typographer Radim Pesko — the typeface we called “Emergence.”
A video of the presentation and discussion we had for Home Cooking with the sociologist Janek Sowa and the theorist Stephen Wright around the concepts behind Emergence can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/414483803
We are kindly inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to send us a single phrase or sentence, reflecting on the ways in which today, especially during the Coronacene, both the self and the crowd have mutated into new, unexpected forms. Let’s think and talk about collective intelligence, the evolution and plasticity of the social brain and social bonds, self-organization, solidarity, the multitude, the self as polyphony, and the future of singular versus hybrid/collective authorship and sympoiesis/collective creativity. Please send us single phrases or sentences around these questions and we will turn them into individual posters using the Emergence typeface. This collection of posters will form Collective Intelligence: an artwork based on collective authorship, collective ownership, and profit sharing. Our goal is for this artwork/collection to be exhibited as a whole and collectively owned by many “shareholders,” both institutions and individuals. We hope to auction the poster collection’s “shares” several times and each time redistribute the profits among participating artists, writers, and thinkers who need it most these days. It could develop into many interesting directions. Please send your contributions (a single sentence or phrase) to Radim Peško mail@radimpesko.com or myself info@kurantstudio.com. Please share this freely with other artists, writers, and thinkers.

The investigative aspect of “Collective Intelligence” dominates the whole project. The resulting artwork and its potential sales and profit will test not only the possibility to generate income for a group but also the concepts of collective ownership and authorship. Whereas, it is no doubt that thinking about Universal  Basic Income and testing its feasibility is crucial in the age of Coronacene. As the project requires the mental switch from individual to a collective mind-set with the subsequent knockdown of capitalistic ideas, I expect this to generate extensive debate. So, let’s stay tuned and follow the project on #collectiveintelligence and  @____homecooking____

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Social distancing – Week 6: “2 Lizards” by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki

Have you ever read “The Best and The Worst of The Art World” which Artnet publishes every Friday? It is a bullet point list of news divided into two categories, predictably “Best” and “Worst”. Reading it is for fun. It is like taking a quiz in which one can also learn by reading just the news in capsules. Often, while going through the list, I become curious about something and decide to go deeper by clicking on the article links. It was in this way that I found out about the popular video series, “2 Lizards”. The project was launched on Instagram IGTV in early March by artist Meriem Bennani, in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Orian Barki (both millennials and based in New York).

The series is presented in 2-minute episodes mixing 3D-renderings of animals set against real footage. The main characters are two lizards living in Brooklyn during the lockdown sharing their thoughts, concerns, and feelings of isolation. The neighbours are animals of other species. Since the first episode (there are five to date), the artist duo has been contacted by creatives willing to contribute to the project. So, they opened up and started remote collaborations with friends and peers, adding soundtracks and voices to the films.

Episode 1 went viral getting more than 154k views at the time of writing. How comes that these short videos are so popular??? They are comforting. We can easily identify with the animated characters as they express our own feelings perfectly. In fact, both plots and dialogues are taken from everyday situations we are all living through in this strange time of social distancing. In the first chapter, the 2 lizards snoop at their neighbourhood from a terrace while conversing on the quarantine optimistically. “In a fucked up way, I’m loving this,” says one. The other answers back: “That is such a quarantine week one thing to say.” 

Episode 4 is about a feline nurse’s day-to-day life who talks with the two reptiles. The cat-nurse reports one heart-breaking event that happened during one of her shifts at the hospital. A patient connected to a ventilator, telephones his wife. The nurse, who was holding the mobile to the patient’s ear, explains how bad she felt as all the wife could hear was a ventilator. The video ends with the ubiquitous clapping for carers from balconies, and the nurse asserting “this pandemic has made me way cooler than I really am.”

Episode 5 is probably the most iconic of the series until now. The 2 reptiles go out for a stroll in a deserted New York City. They discuss how the city has changed and how, after all, still looks normal if not for the frozen economy. At a certain point, one of the lizards gets a call from her French mother. The mother-daughter chat reveals a condition familiar to many living in big cities, living overseas from their families while having news updates from home countries. When the phone call ends, the other companion needs to pee. Soon the buddies realise nothing is really the same during the lockdown. Starbucks is closed, and the lizard answers the call of nature in Time Square, pointing out that there is nobody around.

Bennani and Barki cunningly translate what we hear and see on TV and social media onto these witty micro-videos. What I felt from watching the episodes is that I am a person like many others. I find in these short animations something that belongs to me too, hope and anxiety. The reptiles’ lives and their dialogues perfectly embody our current ordinary in the uncertainty of the pandemic.

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Social distancing – Week 4: The Ozone Layering Method by Keiken

This week I explore the Ozone project by the art collective based in Berlin and London, KeiKen, who took over Hek’s Instagram page last Tuesday.  HeK (House of electronic arts in Basel, CH) invited the collective as part of the lockdown initiative, #HekNetWorks which supports artists’ net-based projects created during the pandemic.

For the event, Keiken launched the Ozone filter, a new Instagram filter through which users could practice meditation connecting with their surrounding environment. The filter generates an augmented reality where the environment is layered onto the users’ face appearing as one entity. The project has been presented as the Ozone Layering Method for which Keiken led Livestream lessons. The collective taught how to use the filter (you can find it on both Hek and Keiken’s Instagram pages) to reach our higher selves through the digital spiritual practice. From the Ozone Layering Method steps: “users must practice still or with slow movements whilst their environment moves around them.” You can practice anywhere, but the best effects are obtained when outside.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-9af0bFKft/

If you use the filter in the open air, your surrounding reflects onto your face. I thought that having the sky on my face was a gorgeous idea, and I decided to try the Ozone filter. As soon as I tried it and had the sky mapped onto my forehead, a song popped up in my mind, “Il Cielo in Una Stanza” (The Sky in a Room) by Gino Paoli (1960). This song was used in 2018 by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson for a performance co-commissioned by Artes Mundi and National Museum of Wales, “The Sky in a Room” (3rd Feb – 11th Mar 2018 at the National Museum of Cardiff). In a video, the artist said: “Gino Paoli wrote about being in a space that suddenly transforms into endless woods, the ceiling becomes sky with stars etc. […] and everything becomes, transforms.”

Therefore, when outdoor using Keiken’s Ozone filter, your head (the walls) clears and becomes sky. The result is potentially endless and pure content that occupies our minds in the digital reality we inhabit while using Instagram. Definitely a beautiful way to use social media during such an uncertain time!

After the takeover of Hek’s Instagram page last week, Keiken announced they will launch a new filter every Tuesday of the lockdown. Today is Tuesday, so stay tuned, meditate, and visit @_Keiken_ to find out what’s next!

Screenshot taken from Keiken story of Monday 21st April.
Screenshot taken from Keiken story of Monday 21st April.

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Social distancing – week 2: How Chalton Gallery strengthens its role of art ambassador during the Coronavirus pandemic.

In the past two weeks, I have been following art institutions and galleries on Instagram, listening to Art Tactic podcasts, and reading articles in Artnet news and Frieze. It seems to me that the general feeling switched from optimistic to realist. Optimistic because, initially, the imposed work-from-home to reduce the spread of the virus, together with the increased use of digital platforms were seen as ways to cost-cutting in the overly expensive art industry. Optimism quickly passed its sceptre to a more realist view by unveiling a widespread lack of digital strategies among medium and small art galleries. It seems that many galleries are unprepared to make the best out of their online businesses. Another pitfall of the digital system is its inability to engage audiences by failing to offer memorable experiences to the public. Despite galleries accepting the challenge of keeping businesses going and engaging their public, they are struggling to succeed in this difficult time. The truth is that we are spending a lot of time in front of a screen without experiencing any physical event at all.  Is this the right way to get through COVID-19 pandemic and establish a better future? Maybe not. With this question in mind, Chalton Gallery is promoting an alternative way with a call for a period of reflection and introspection.

Chalton Gallery in London & Chalton Projects is a not-for-profit art organisation that operates in Mexico and the UK connecting Mexican artists and cultural institutions with the British art scene. On Sunday 19th March, the gallery announced its temporary closure to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. Soon, what was planned to be their June show, launched as the online programme by artist Christina Ochoa (Colombian based in Mexico), “Pharakon: Garden of Psychotropical Hope” (the first session is available at https://vimeo.com/399380478 with a contribution of £5 to support the artist’s practice).

Pharmakon is part of Ochoa’s educational and aesthetic ongoing research, in which she investigates the relationship between traditional pharmacy, based on the use of plants as medicinal, and contemporary mode of consumerism. In “Pharakon: Garden of Psychotropical Hope”,  the artist will lead a series of online workshops in which she will teach natural recipes that help to relieve us from stress and heal our anxiety. As Ochoa wrote in the workshop page: “this workshop is intended to take us in to the kitchen and find there in a DIY way the poetics of herbaria.”

Tuned with Ochoa’s work, Chalton appeals to a period of meditation and introspection, questioning the race to creating new and more online content in such an uncertain time.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-EZjJnlZPw/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

“We the Art ambassadors have the obligation to respond by restoring order or by creating a new order. We can’t keep calling anything Art and calling ourselves artists if we do not understand the Present and connect back to our selves, our societies, our Mother Earth and to our deep Cosmos.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fr6jlFXlA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The message from Chalton Gallery is a plea for humans to reconnect with nature and asks us to use this time to re-balance through introspection and meditation. At the same time, the gallery is spreading public art by sticking messages in the shop windows that are shut as the effect of the lockdown.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-oukzAlTf3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

In my opinion, behind what at first sight seems to be a call for non-action (indeed meditation), lays a strong commitment to take action and make more art by using public spaces. In fact, Chalton is using closed shops which, until before the lockdown, were the very places where the everyday social interaction lived. With these messages, empty stores still provide their services to society. Even in the era of social distancing, social interaction can still happen in the physical world, and Chalton Gallery is proving this.

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What’s happening?

Coronavirus image taken from Google search on 23-03-2020
Coronavirus – screenshot taken from BBC on 23-03-2020

 

May you live in interesting times - taken from Google search on 23-03-2020
Image taken from Google search on 23-03-2020

“May you live in interesting times” is the title of the 58th Venice Biennale (11th May – 24th November 2019) curated by Ralph Rugoff. Like a prophecy, this title seems to have revealed divine truth, and in fact we are now living in the most interesting of all times. Art Basel Hong Kong has been cancelled, the Biennale Architettura 2020 has been postponed, Frieze NY cancelled and so 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Art Night London postponed to 2021, and all art galleries and museums shut down until ‘further notice’ to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.

As the virus is bringing an unprecedented time in the history of contemporary society (and in my own life time as it took away my job!) and all seems to be tried anew, we are urged to think creatively and test new paths and methods of survival.

The slate is blank and is for us to be resilient.

In the immediate, I decided to come back to my blog and document what I read, listen, and see happening in the art world right now through the internet filter.

Stay safe! Stay tuned!