Human is at Schinkel Pavillon

Curated by Nina Pohl & Franziska Sophie Wildförster. Initial curatorial idea by Laura López Paniagua

19. March 2023 – 23. July 2023

Distinctions between dystopia and reality are increasingly collapsing in the face of inexhorable tech-nological and ecological upheavals. Against this backdrop, Human Is employs science fiction as a spiritual and aesthetic vehicle to mobilize alternative futures, political imagination and a new posthuman ethics. This exhibition borrows its name from the eponymous short story by Philip K. Dick (1955) and investigates the idea of being human as a contestable and reversible category.

Since the 19th century – and its notions of capitalist, scientific and technological progress – science fiction has held up a mirror to the changing contemporary »conditio humana« with its values, fears and limitations. The seemingly external threat of extraterrestrial, supernatural or artificial beings often reveals itself as self-made anxiety and part of our cultural condition. The monstrosity of the unknown arises to shake up limitations, in effect, decentering the human protagonist.

Human Is juxtaposes historical with newly produced artworks. The exhibition paints a polyphonic picture of the mutual penetration of body and technology: it addresses the often violent interde-pendence of humans on their technological surroundings and opposes any promises of salvation through trans-humanistic progress. Simultaneously, it opens up spaces of possibility in which dual-istic taxonomies can be overcome in favor of a networked and interdependent existence. Human Is engages science fiction to transcend the humanistically inscribed human, on the one hand, and the species of anthropos, on the other, through both material and perspectival liminality. Many works uncover the hierarchies of power that have traditionally dehumanized the Other. Afrofuturism, for instance, imagines a society beyond the histories of exploitation and discrimination in which people can live in equality, often through strategies of mutation, hybridization and camouflage.

For many, the collapse of the systems we have come to rely on is no longer a distant apocalyptic future. Visionary science fiction writer Ursula K. le Guin sees fiction as a container for reinventing the possibilities of human experience and knowledge beyond any linear narrative of progress. And it is through these stories that the destruction and alienation of contemporary existence can trigger creative processes and a new ethics of relationality, which may no longer be truly human.

Artists: Joachim Bandau, Ivana Bašić, Ian Cheng, David Cronenberg, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Tishan Hsu, Laika, Fritz Lang, Mike Kelley, Alexander Kluge, Tetsumi Kudo, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Nour Mobarak, Sandra Mujinga, Mary Shelley, Diane Severin Nguyen, Ovartaci, Analisa Teachworth, Suzanne Treister and WangShui

Armory New York 2023

with Francesca Minini & Massimo Minini

From the dust, it is roused
the Body Pneumatic

2023

Wax, breath, blown glass, race-car exhaust manifolds, bronze, stainless steel, pressure

Au-delà Lafayette Anticipations

Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska

21 February - 07 May 2023

Bringing together artists from across different generations, Au-delà transforms Lafayette Anticipations into a journey evoking rituals at once ancient and contemporary, individual and collective, pagan and divine, in the search of a new sacred, a new unifying force.

While the world becomes increasingly wounded and desecrated and people seem more detached from the magic and power of the earth, the desire to invent and reinvent rituals and languages which would enable us to reach the sacred can be seen as a reaction to the degradation of the living, a counterculture responding to the general profanity of life. The subject of ritual—what makes us chant and dance, laugh and cry, dwell and transcend—tells a part of the history of our humanity while also outlining the one we hope to invent.
 
Unfolding like a choreographed rite itself through new, as well as rarely exhibited historical, modern, and contemporary works from the fields of art, music, fashion, and theatre, Au-delà takes us into a world in constant transformation, pulling us “beyond”, deeper into ourselves and through the layers of time in order to reinforce our presence in the now.

Artists: Alicia Adamerovich · Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic · Ivana Bašić · Hildegard von Bingen · Bianca Bondi · Romeo Castellucci · Matthew Angelo Harrison · Eva Hesse · Janina Kraupe-Świderska · Wifredo Lam · Michèle Lamy · Tau Lewis · Kat Lyons · Kali Malone · Ana Mendieta · Christelle Oyiri · Tobias Spichtig · TARWUK · Jeanne Vicerial · Anna Zemánková. As well as Cycladic idols and a Punic stele.

Form of Flight | Solo Show | François Ghebaly, New York

12.10. 2022 - 01.21.2023

Chapter 3HREE 'What is important now is to recover our senses'
Het Hem Amsterdam

1 . 24 . 2020 - 8 . 2 . 2020

Curated by Maarten Spruyt & Rieke Vos

CRASH TEST | Molecular Revolution
curated by Nicolas Bourriaud
MOCO Montpellier

Belay My Light, the Ground Is Gone, 2018
Wax, pink alabaster, blown glass, breath, dust, weight, oil paint, pressure, stainless steel

WILD AT HEART
Marlborough New York

-

06 . 14 . 2021 - 08 . 11 . 2021

Ahmed Alsoudani, Alice Aycock, Ivana Bašić, Chakaia Booker, Enzo Cucchi, Inka Essenhigh, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Ron Gorchov, Justen Ladda, Le’Andra LeSeur, Ran Ortner and Beverly Pepper.

INCORPOREA 03
Basement Roma

-

09 . 18 . 2020 - 09 . 30 . 2021

INCORPOREA is a year-long choral exhibition set up as to develop and transform itself over time, and aimed at investigating the body in all its folds and meanings: the body as a revolutionary space, of antagonism and freedom, expression and research, self-definition and power, identity and gender.

Going across different generations and media, starting from new artistic expressions and going back towards the historical avant-gardes, INCORPOREA will investigate the practices that have uncovered, transformed and re-imagined the body and the speculations it has inspired.

Moving around the boundaries, meanings and shapes of the body, the exhibition intends to introduce a new corpus of works every month in a sort of endless movement, a constant flow of addition and subtraction, with the aim of exploring an urgent and significant theme, articulating the elements that define it beyond preconceived categories, in today’s ever-changing scenario.

Artists: Ivana Bašić, Yu Ji, Hannah Levy


The Body Electric
Museum of Art and Design, Miami Dade College

11 . 5 . 2020 - 5 . 30 . 2020

The Body Electric, a major exhibition that looks at our fraught relationship to technology, particularly the increasingly inescapable interface between our bodies and screens. The remarkably varied art in the exhibition examines the last fifty years of artists addressing the way technological mediation has come to dominate our interactions with the world, with each other, and with our selves. 

In an age dominated by digital technology, The Body Electric explores themes of the real and the virtual, the organic and the artificial, moving from the world into the screen and back again. Looking across the past fifty years, the exhibition presents an intergenerational and international group of twenty-six artists who have seized upon the screen as a place to rethink the body and identity, with a particular emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The exhibition contextualizes contemporary artists who today engage with digital technology and the influence of the Internet within a broader art historical narrative to reveal shared interests that emerge across generations, despite differing technological means. 

Video cameras record private moments and public spectacles, photographs capture alternate personas, and digital avatars simulate human behavior. Together, they reveal ways that technology changes our collective understanding of the body, everyday life, and sense of self. Works in the exhibition—from the inviting and familiar to the provocative and unsettling—question ways that photographic, televisual, and digital media affect our perceptions of the human body and ordinary experience. 

The Body Electric is curated by Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, with Jadine Collingwood, Curatorial Fellow. The presentation at MOAD is organized by Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator, with Isabela Villanueva, Consulting Assistant Curator 

Frieze New York 2020
Marlborough Gallery

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I too had thousands of blinking cilia,
while my belly, new and made for the ground
was being reborn | Position III

2020
Materials: Wax, bronze, breath, blown glass, oil paint, stainless steel, pressure

Artissima 2019
Novembar Gallery

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I too had thousands of blinking cilia,
while my belly, new and made for the ground
was being reborn | Position II
2019
Materials: Wax, bronze, breath, blown glass, oil paint, stainless steel, pressure

KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn
Open Collections: The Artist Takes the Floor

7.5.19 - 11.10.19

A special project titled “Mutant”, curated by Maria Arusoo and organized by Eha Komissarov at KUMU Kunsti Museum.

In the show Estonian artist Aili Vint’s print series titled "Variations" (1980 - 1987), 19th century prints as well as the oldest work in the show - a painting by an unknown Italian artist which dates back to the 17th century have all been placed in a dialogue with artworks by a New York based Serbian contemporary artist Ivana Bašić. The curated project deals with the dystopian human body of the past and future, taking into account the destruction and alienation of the body in the post-capitalist society of today.

Museum Website

Art Brussels ‘18
Gallery Pact
—

I too had thousands of blinking cilia, 
while my belly, new and made for the ground 
was being reborn

2018/2019

Materials: Wax, breath, bronze, glass, oil paint, weight, stainless steel, pressure

Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
Curated by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator
Whitney Museum of Art

Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 focuses on the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new experiences of the moving image. The exhibition will fill the Museum’s 18,000-square-foot fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries, and will include a film series in the third-floor Susan and John Hess Family Theater. 

The exhibition’s title refers to the science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s alternate fictional dimension, whose terrain of cities, forests, mountains, and an underworld can be visited only through dreams. Similarly, the spaces in Dreamlands will connect different historical moments of cinematic experimentation, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive spaces.

The exhibition will be the most technologically complex project mounted in the Whitney’s new building to date, embracing a wide range of moving image techniques, from hand-painted film to the latest digital technologies. The works on view use color, touch, music, spectacle, light, and darkness to confound expectations, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions.

Artists:

Trisha Baga, Ivana Bašić, Frances Bodomo, Dora Budor, Ian Cheng, Bruce Conner, Ben Coonley, Joseph Cornell, Andrea Crespo, François Curlet, Alex Da Corte, Oskar Fischinger, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Alex Israel, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Pierre Joseph, Aidan Koch, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anthony McCall, Josiah McElheny, Syd Mead, Lorna Mills, Jayson Musson, Melik Ohanian, Philippe Parreno, Jenny Perlin, Mathias Poledna, Edwin S. Porter, Oskar Schlemmer, Hito Steyerl, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Stan VanDerBeek, Artie Vierkant, and Jud Yalkut

Museum Website

Artificial Paradise?
Immersion in Space and Time
Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz

9.23.2018 - 11.29.2018

Artists:

Banz & Bowinkel
Ivana Bašić
Paul Chan
Frauke Dannert
Harun Farocki
Olga Fedorova
Johann Kniep
Marc Lee
Manuel Roßner
Gerriet K. Sharma
Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Addie Wagenknecht

Athens Biennale ‘18
ANTI

10.26.18. - 12. 9.18

Curators: Stefanie Hessler / Poka-Yio / Kostis Stafylakis

Enter ANTI: ANTI is a preposition, a position, a person. ANTI is indulgent, ascetic, libertarian. ANTI invests in bitcoins and detests political correctness. ΑΝΤΙ is a contraestablishment politician, a humanist, a creature of our time.

The 6th Athens Biennale flirts with the term, the attitude, the (im)possibility of ANTI. It asks: How does opposition play out today? And what kinds of identities does it forge? At present, an oppositional stance, an attitude of ANTI—an “antitude”—seems to encompass wide arenas of social life including cultural expressions, identity politics, art labor, media and scripted protagonist impersonations on Netflix as well as “weird advertising”, videogames and music video productions. In other words, attitudes of resistance, non-conformity and marginality are rapidly becoming canonized and commodified. ANTI is adored and detested as pre-eminent role model. The imagery of the cunning villain, the proactive manipulator, the taboo perpetrator, is one of today’s most fascinating characters in institutional and counter-establishment politics, tactical resistance and pop culture.

Anthens Biennale Website

Ecce Puer

57. Belgrade Biennale / OCTOBER SALON
The Marvelous Cacophony
Belgrade City Museum

Curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran and Danielle Kvaran

The Marvellous Cacophony is based on the idea of diversity. This concept puts the Serbian and the Belgrade art scenes into an international context, but at the same time, refers to the complex cultural and socio-political situation in the region. At the beginning of 21st century, despite the fact that the Western notion of contemporary art has become an universal model of reference, no single common denominator has emerged. The art world has many centres, multi-layered activities, a plurality of ideas about what art is and what it can be, and an impressive number of heterogeneous works. This Marvellous Cacophony reflects the richness of the world. It is a positive condition, creating energies that can include dissonance and even conflicting ideas and expressions. It involves the coexistence of multiple identities and permanent relational flows, conveying notions of miscellany and openness, and creating meaningful narratives about art and culture, social issues and politics. The Marvellous Cacophony will explore worldwide artistic production, looking into diverse art scenes and different generations of living artists. It will bring together a constellation of works that express, through their forms, structures, materials, techniques, devices and content, the extraordinary richness of contemporary artistic expression.


Belgrade Biennale Website

KÖRPERWENDE
FROM NAM JUNE PAIK TO HIROSHI ISHIGURO
NRW-Forum Museum, Dusseldorf

3.29.19 – 5.5.19

Artists:

Erika Kiffl
Hiroshi Ishiguro
Ivana Bašić
Martina Menegon
Nam June Paik
Nick Ervinck
Oscar Santillan
Pinar Yoldas

Immortalism
Kunstverein Freiburg

9.15.17 - 10.27.17

In 1922, under the slogan ‘immortalism and interplanetarism’ the Moscow bio-cosmists demanded nothing less than the immediate elimination of the temporal and spatial limits of human life. They follow in the footsteps of Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903). He speculated about the abolition of mortality and the resurrection of all humans by the technology of art under the auspices of a state becoming a museum. Fyodorovs ideas influenced theorists, scientists and activists in pre- and early soviet times. The cosmists share the belief in a rational evolution of mankind, finding its completion in the overcoming of death and the conquest of space.

Today developments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology fuel transhumanist utopias of eliminating the temporal limits of human life. It comes as no surprise that Calico – the Califoria Life Company a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. – set itself the business objective to prolong human life. Yet, whereas Russian cosmists regarded the achievement of human immortality as a collective, ‘common task’ many current transhumanist aspirations are aimed at self-optimisation.

The exhibition Immortalismus (Immortalism) brings together works by contemporary artists that open up different perspectives on visions, technologies and ideologies to overcome death. It takes the utopian ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov and the Russian avant-garde movement of the cosmists as a historical starting point.

Museum Website