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export const ARTISTS = {
nora: {
name: "Nora Al-Badri",
location: "CCCB and c-base, Berlin, Germany",
start: "nora-1",
bio: `
<p>
<a href="https://www.nora-al-badri.de" target="_blank">www.nora-al-badri.de</a>
</p>
<p>
Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is currently the first artist-in-residence at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL) and its Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting, non-human agency and transcendence. She has exhibited in the Viktoria and Albert Museums' Applied Arts Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 3rd Design Biennal Istanbul, ZKM Karlsruhe, Science Gallery, Dublin. Berliner Herbstsalon - Gorki Theater, Ars Electronica, Abandon Normal Devices, The Influencers, etc. Al-Badri regularly gives classes and lectures at universities and museums all over the world such as Techne Institute at University of Buffalo, MassArt Boston, UDK university Berlin, Hochschule Weissensee Berlin, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, University of Halle and IRIBA Center for Multimedia Heritage and different Kigali, Warburg Institute and Central Saint Martins College London, UCL London, Einstein Center for Digital Future Berlin. Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Mozilla Festival and many more. She is acting as jury member for the Chaos Communication Congress' Arts & Culture Track, the jury of Berlinale Peace Price from Heinrich Böll Foundation (2019) and the jury of the Digital Academy Dortmund (2019).
</p>
`,
statement: `
<p>
<b>AFU. This is not a hackerspace.</b>
<p>
</p>
Welcome to some savage archaeology in outta space! Occupy Archaeology! Occupy hackerspaces!
<p>
</p>
We are in dire need of more cave paintings in hackerspaces. More boards of mothers leading us with ferocity and care. More PC towers of Babylon. More hieroglyphic encryption and more hybrid creatures. The artefact is the agent creating subaltern hackerspaces with HERitage und HERstory.
<p>
</p>
All made by hand, thousands of years ago, remixed, stitched by hand, through software yesterday, conceived in a 3D printer today and reimagined tomorrow… The printer itself is the fetish object of open source and making communities. Forget ‘do-it-yourself’. It has always been the time for ‘do-it-together’. We, women of color, the invisible spirits and workforce, imagined and built computers and systems… We did the tinkering, always. And we don’t exist in dualisms of maker/made.
<p>
</p>
Forget the god-lists that scientists made up of the ancient materials. No need for hierarchies of gods or domination of one god over another. Few spirits kept their identity throughout millennia. In outta space we prefer spirits to gods. Spirits that are fluid and that emulate from one to another. Spirits, Diĝir, Nin—that care for their spaces and people… The geek is resolved in punk archaeology by the crafting and coding of spirits, masquerades, witches, goddesses and daimons...
<p>
</p>
We spirits defy linear temporality, mixing material and human life of different times... We are nodes of the causal network that gives events and codes coherence and meaning. One can recognise our ways when people (now and then) self-organise, envision, resist and revolt…
<p>
`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "15.1%",
left: "47.7%",
},
},
leite: {
name: "Juliana Cerqueria Leite",
location: "Santa Ifigênia, São Paolo, Brazil",
start: "leite-chapter-1",
bio: `
<p>
<a href="https://www.julianacerqueiraleite.com" target="_blank">www.julianacerqueiraleite.com</a>
</p>
<p>
Juliana Cerqueira Leite (b. 1981) is a Brazilian/American sculptor based in New York and Sao Paolo. Cerqueira Leite received the 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for her exhibition Orogenesis at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy. She was awarded the 2016 Furla Art Prize for her contribution to the 5th Moscow Young Art Biennale. She has exhibited her work in sculpture, drawing, photography and video internationally in solo shows in venues including Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Arsenal Contemporary in New York and Montreal, Galeria Casa Triângulo in São Paulo, Alma Zevi gallery in Venice, Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, TJ Boulting in London and Regina Rex Gallery in New York. She has also exhibited her work in group shows and biennials including Hordaland Kunstsenter for Bergen Assembly, Sculpture Center in New York, Ilmin Museum in Seoul, Marres House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, and Saatchi Gallery in London. Her work has been commissioned by international Biennials and Triennials including The Antarctic Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, Bergen Assembly 2019, Moscow Young Art Biennale, Marrakech Biennale and the 2014 Vancouver Sculpture Biennial. Cerqueira Leite graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) Graduate Sculpture program in 2006, London, as the inaugural recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize.
</p>
`,
statement: `
<p>
<i>Untitled</i>, 2021
</p>
<p>
‘This work doesn’t really have a title. In many ways it is atypical of my practice, which is normally object based, indexical of the body, and very physical. Making something solely for the purposes of an online experience, working during a COVID-19 peak, in a temporary studio in Brazil—facing challenges finding materials in art supply shops with empty shelves, and so on—led me to approach the project as a one-off thing. An important pressure was removed: objects that I made could fall apart immediately after the show because their relationship with the exhibition was inverted: The Last Museum is durable, the artworks are not. And where is this exhibition anyway?—somewhere in-between my inner monologue and yours, not ever outside enough, but not totally inside our heads either. The stakes are low for both of us and these tenuous relations are filled with anxiety.
</p>
<p>
The real brought into this space was filmed in the São Paulo neighborhood of Santa Ifigênia, named after the eponymous black Ethiopian Saint. This historic part of the city center has mutated according to the consumer needs of the population: At the start of the 20th Century it was the neighborhood for buying fabric, then radios, then TVs and VCRs, now CPUs, laptops, servers, everything in between. Despite decades of city abandonment and corruption, traditional family-run businesses are still there, hanging on. The nouns for the high tech wares that they sell conjure visions of China, Apple Stores, Silicon Valley, dustless rooms, glass buildings, white people with tidy haircuts. In reality, here laptops are opened and soldered unceremoniously in front of their brown skinned owners, gaming stacks assembled as you wait and chat in a friendly, crowded warehouse; your iPhone is fitted with an off brand screen… The magic here is a pirated version of the entire Adobe suite, cheap enough that you can actually afford to own these programs, learn them, and maybe get yourself a job.
</p>
<p>
Three blocks away from what is now the city’s most important physical technology shopping hub is what we, from São Paulo, refer to as crack-land. It’s the bottom that you hit when you’ve fallen through all the fragile threads of the human affective support net. People there are people like you and I, but they have lost everything that could frame them—living in a state of flux between gathering cardboard boxes for cash, scoring $3 for crack, getting high and then crashing out for days.
</p>
<p>
The physical proximity of these two hubs, crack-land and Santa Ifigênia, is an ugly caricature of how app developers call us users and study how to trigger addiction. I didn’t film crack addicted people, but I think you should know this thin-bodied reality was all around us, as myself and my crew of three filmed quickly to avoid interrupting the jobs of people who kindly let us into their spaces, or consented to risk by letting us film their illegal merchandise.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps becoming disembodied I am liberated from my specificity, and can make new configurations of being. Virtually, I can leapfrog the physical restrictions of nationhood, sexed bodies, and color. But mostly that’s not how it actually feels. The same illusions that impose those restrictions in the first place are still out here like a hangover. The digital relations and the appification of life doesn’t yet satisfy actual bodily needs: wages for affordable food, real human affection, shelter, and a future. They’ve instead increased the speed of the bottom to top cash funnel. Depression, my anxiety and accompanying loneliness, parallels the rise in my screen use; it’s by now kind of obvious, there’s no coincidence. The desire for touch and taste is a hard one to sublimate.
</p>
`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "59%",
left: "32%",
},
},
foreshew: {
name: "Nicole Foreshew",
location: "Urumbilum River, Gumbaynggirr Country, Australia",
start: "foreshew-1",
bio: `
<p>
<a href="https://www.nicoleforeshew.com" target="_blank">www.nicoleforeshew.com</a>
</p>
<p>
Nicole Foreshew (b. 1982) lives and works Urunga, New South Wales, Wiradjuri Nation. Nicole Foreshew is a Wiradjuri artist, writer and curator. Her practice incorporates mediums including photography, video and sculpture through which she maintains an ongoing thematic exploration of her heritage through contemporary and innovative frameworks. Foreshew has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, including Primavera 2017: Young Australian Artists, MCA (2017); Mulunma (Within, Inside), Manly Art Gallery and Museum (2016); Old Land New Marks, Dubbo Regional Gallery (2016); Sixth Sense, National Art School Gallery, National Art School, Sydney (2016); Shimmer, Tarnanthi, Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Adelaide, South Australia (2015); Wiradjuri Ngurambanggu, Murray Art Museum Albury (2015); Hereby Make Protest, Carriageworks, Sydney (2014); Shadowlife, Bendigo Art Gallery (2013); Born in Darkness Before Dawn, a major public artwork commission for Place Projections, Eora Journey, a City of Sydney arts initiative, (2013) and Maamungun Compatriots, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India (2012). Foreshew is the recipient of a number of public commissions, including Wynscreen, Transport for NSW, Wynyard Walk, Sydney (2017) and Eora Journey, City of Sydney (2014). In 2014 she was awarded a NSW Aboriginal Art Fellowship from Arts NSW to undertake her work titled Grounded: Earth’s materials, processes and structures, which won the prestigious NSW Aboriginal Parliamentary Prize. In 2015 Foreshew was Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and guest curator for Primavera 2015, the MCA’s annual exhibition of young Australian artists aged 35 and under. Her works are held in a number of state and regional galleries across Australia including the Murray Art Museum, Albury, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
</p>
`,
statement: `
<p>
<i>Dhurany Yanggu</i> (message song of running water), 2021
</p>
<p>
Wiradjuri Artist Nicole Foreshew’s <i>Dhurany yanggu</i> (message song of running water) is a collection of hand built, strung and gathered sculptures installed at sites within the Urumbilum River in rural Australia, where the artist is now living. Urumbilum is a perennial stream of the Clarence River catchment, located on Gumbaynggirr Country, Northern Tablelands and Northern Rivers districts of New South Wales, Australia. Gumbaynggirr forms one of the largest coastal Aboriginal Nations in New South Wales.
</p>
<p>
‘My works embed Wiradjuri knowledge and are anchored on Gumbaynggirr Country where I now live. <i>Dhurany Yanggu</i> transmits the concept of ‘message sticks’, an ancient form of communication that has been used for tens of thousands of years—which is still in use today in some parts of Australia. Textiles, clay, rock, trees, plants and minerals have formed the substance of my practice over the past decade, directing the atmosphere and meaning of my sculptures, films and photographs. In addition, the video documentation of objects is meant to prove to its recipient that the messages being carried are undisputable. Colonial histories are long and hypnotising, remembered by the people and imprinted on the land itself. The objects placed become marks in the landscape that are distinctive to my Wiradjuri nation. They hold many stories of loss, disaster, destruction and change. Each object acts as a mediator defining a land and culture that has endured massive change, and draws on archaeologies of land and place.’
</p>
`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "68%",
left: "83%",
},
},
stankievech: {
name: "Charles Stankievech",
location: "Cosmic Ray Research Station, Canadian Rockies (Winter Solstice)",
start: "stankievech-1",
bio: `
<p>
<a href="https://www.stankievech.net/" target="_blank">www.stankievech.net</a>
</p>
<p>
Charles Stankievech (b.1978, Canada) is an artist whose research has explored issues such as the notion of “fieldwork” in the embedded landscape, the military industrial complex, and the history of technology. His diverse body of work has been shown internationally at the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; MassMoca, Massachussetts; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Venice Architecture and SITE Santa Fe Biennales. His lectures for Documenta 13 and the 8th Berlin Biennale were as much performance as pedagogy while his writing has been published in academic journals by MIT and Princeton Architectural Press. His idiosyncratic and obsessively researched curatorial projects include Magnetic Norths at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University and CounterIntelligence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto. From 2010-2011 (and again currently from 2014-15) he was hired as a private contractor for the Department of National Defense where he conducted independent research in intelligence operations under the rubric of the CFAP. He was a founding faculty member of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, Canada and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. Since 2011, he has been co-director of the art and theory press <a href="https://k-verlag.org/" target="_blank">K. Verlag</a> in Berlin.
</p>
`,
statement: `
<p>
Shot primarily at the historic Cosmic Ray Research Station in the Canadian Rockies, on Winter Solstice, <i>The Glass Key</i> travels across the time and space of humans attempting to understand and communicate a sense of place in the cosmos: from ancient sun worship through to contemporary neutrino and dark matter research. In narrative terms, the work starts with a paradoxical climbing of the mystical “mountain of the sun” while the subject dives into a deeper interior, psychological, “cosmic cave.”
</p>
<p>
The soundtrack, which guides the project and is composed as a binaural work for headphone listening, has three components: A reverbing drone is generated out of field recordings of MIT radomes and WWI sound mirrors; sparkling field recording of ionospheric collisions crackle around the cranium, occasionally catching the signalling of satellites. Finally, literary text fragments are translated into morse code expressed in the pulse of a heartbeat. These three layers are spatially mixed, from spacious soundscape through the threshold of the head into the interior of the body.
</p>
<p>
As a counterpoint to modern scientific investigations into cosmic rays, LIDAR (laser 3D measurement) recordings were done on Spring Equinox at a Mayan temple in the Yucatan. Retracing not only the architectural history of Mesoamerican culture, The Glass Key follows Robert Smithson’s 1969 journey through the landscape as he attempted to define site-specific art in particular contrast to the archival format of photography and mapmaking.
</p>
<p>
As we move close to the summit of the Cosmic Research Station, we are reminded of the materiality of light via the historical use of Icelandic Spar in ancient navigation and scientific processes. Thomas Pynchon speculates that such polarizing of light also creates a hidden world for the non-human and the doubling of existence between the visible and non-visible, a sort of superpositionality between site and non-site. A pop up video of 1980s HyperCard coding language (a precursor to the user interface of the internet today) visualizes the ancient antithetical iconography of the cave in the mountain (a triangle within a triangle).
</p>
<p>
If there is an antithesis to the pure light of the sun or almost massless aspect of neutrinos, then it is the history of meteorites. Nothing more solid falls from the cosmos into the earth’s atmosphere. And yet, it enters as a luminous ball of fire from the heavens. Placed at 2km above sea level at the Cosmic Ray Research Station, a cross section of the oldest known meteorite to have impacted the earth becomes a portal into the Canadian Neutrino observatory (SNO) buried 2kms below the earth's surface. Eliade, one of the founders of the field of comparative religion, reminds us that the oldest word for <i>iron</i> is <i>an•bar</i>— or the pictogram of <i>fire•sky</i>—the source of the most mystical material before classical antiquity.
</p>
<p>
Catapulted from the interior back to the exterior, we encounter the same meteorite, but this time as a 3 dimensional meteorite crystal, balanced on the peak of the mountain (reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s surrealist masterpiece <i>La clef de verre</i>, 1959). A title originally stolen from the English detective novel, <i>The Glass Key</i> reveals the dream when one attempts to force a locked space with a fragile decoder and the key shatters in the lock. An excerpt from Clarice Lispector’s most enigmatic short story discusses the birth of the metaphysical round object that denies all understanding.
</p>
<p>
<i>The Glass Key</i> ends not by focusing on a natural history object (spar or meteorite) but perhaps the most uniquely anthropogenic crystal: Trinitite. Laying on a bed of snow crystals, a dark green fragment remains—an object composed of fused sand, created when the desert was super-heated by the first nuclear explosion: Trinity. A video of the explosion closes the cycle, where <i>The Desert Turned to Glass</i>. A nuclear winter descends, and we retreat from the pinnacles of mountains and temples into our isolated underground caves, connected through a communication system designed to survive a nuclear apocalypse. Lispector’s lament closes our eclipsed world.”
</p>
`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "15%",
left: "22%",
},
},
nilthamrong: {
name: "Jakrawal Nilthamrong",
location: "Chiang Mai, Thailand",
start: "nilthamrong-home",
bio: `<p>
Jakrawal Nilthamrong (b.1977) is Thai artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. He holds a MFA in Art and Technology Studies. In 2007, he was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s work spans from short films, documentary films to video installations and feature films. The themes of his work often relate to Eastern philosophy in contemporary context and local history of specific environments to establish dialogue among multiple perspectives. His has been shown in international film festivals including Rotterdam, Berlinale, Toronto and Yamagata, as well as exhibitions at 2012 Taipei Biennial and 2014 SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, it is collected by institutions including Kadaist.
</p>`,
statement: `<p>
<i>Wildfires</i> occur frequently during the dry season in northern Thailand’s high mountains. The source of fire is not natural but arson. In the past it was hypothesized that local people set the fires to clear land for agricultural use, or for hunting. There were efforts to solve the problem at the community level, but the fires only became more severe. Strangely, the blazes often occurred in the national park—an area difficult for villagers to access. During the wildfire suppression efforts of May 2020, a group of scholars and volunteers discovered important evidence that would change the original hypothesis: They found several instances of improvised devices made of clothes pegs connected to a small battery by a power cable. Combustion was triggered by a small clod of clay positioned in the middle between the pegs, acting as a timer—after melting in the heat the wires attached to the batteries would ignite. Villagers who were interviewed said that this was not a technique that they were familiar with. Although we cannot know the intention of the burners, it is likely that the park’s natural resources are being used to benefit some group of people. And the poor have always been condemned.
</p>`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "39%",
left: "72%",
},
},
opoku: {
name: "Zohra Opoku",
location: "Mortuary (unfinished), Accra, Ghana",
start: "opoku-1-hail-to-you",
bio: `
<p>
Zohra Opoku (b. 1976) is an artist of Ghanaian and German descent based in Accra, Ghana. Opoko’s practice examines the formation of personal identities, particularly in the context of contemporary Ghana, with a special interest in textiles and dress codes within the context of West Africa’s complex history. While her work relays social commentary and broadly relevant themes around the human experience, each of Zohra’s explorations is intimately rooted in personal identity politics. Exhibited internationally, Zohra Opoku has shown work in association with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (Chicago), Gallery 1957 (Accra), Nubuke Foundation (Accra), Centre for Contemporary Art (Lagos), !Kauru African Contemporary Art (Johannesburg), Commune.1 (Cape Town), Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg), Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth), Musée de l ́Ethnographie (Bourdeax), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), Kunsthal (Rotterdam), Broad Art Museum (Michigan State University) and Museum for Photography (Chicago). Her recent residencies include Institute Sacatar Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; Art Dubai Residents, United Arab Emirates and Black Rock Dakar, Senegal.
</p>
`,
statement: `
<p>
I chose the location because of its originally intended function: A crematorium. This was one of the ambitious but unfortunately unfinished projects initiated by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah government in the 1970s. The building has been abandoned until today.
<p>
</p>
I am very interested in the rough aesthetic of the concrete adjoining with the scrabbled walls, which has developed in the last fifty years. The impression of the building is something historic and it reminds me of the inspirational material for a body of work which I sourced from tomb paintings: the Ancient Egyptian <i>Book of the Dead</i>.
<p>
</p>
The structure is present in central Accra, giving a mysterious backdrop for the prints and works that I share in the videos. It connects in sync with my narrative; to understand ways and visual forms which can take on the journey to an afterlife.
</p>
`,
image: "",
globePosition: {
top: "44%",
left: "44.4%",
},
}
}
export const ARTIST_ORDER = [
"stankievech", "nora", "leite", "opoku", "foreshew", "nilthamrong",
]
export const PROJECT_PAGE_SET = new Set(["essay", "artists", "credits"])
export const ESSAYS = {
nadim: { title: "The Last Museum", author: "Nadim Samman", },
}
export const ESSAY_ORDER = [
"nadim",
]
|
