New Viewings #34

Curated by Inke Arns

House of Mirrors (STFU)

House of Mirrors (STFU) brings together four Berlin based artists who have all been working with digital media for a long time. Aram Bartholl, Nadja Buttendorf, Constant Dullaart and Sebastian Schmieg take us in front of uncanny boxes and mirrors adorned with “Walter Benjamin Nightmare” passwords (Bartholl), we find ourselves on the desktop of the artist displaying an unusual pink sweater and other performative jewelry objects (Buttendorf), they bring us face to face with „Loudly Crying Face“, the most popular emoji on Twitter, and insert the exhibition into uncanny social media feedback loops (Dullaart), and they send us on delirious Google image search trips which make us realize that the algorithm sees patterns where we don’t see any (Schmieg).

House of Mirrors obviously is a tacky title, as it refers to a traditional attraction at funfairs and amusement parks. According to Wikipedia the basic concept behind a house of mirrors is „to be a maze-like puzzle” where “participants are also given mirrors as obstacles, and glass panes to parts of the maze they cannot yet get to. Sometimes the mirrors may be distorted because of different curves, convex, or concave in the glass to give the participants unusual and confusing reflections of themselves, some humorous and others frightening.“ STFU („Shut The F*** Up“), finally, is one of the many abbreviations found online which is used to abruptly end a conversation. House of Mirrors (STFU), however, is meant to open up a dialogue between us and the machines and algorithms out there – with a lot of humorous and some frightening moments. LOL.

Inke Arns

New Viewings \ New Viewings #34

Constant Dullaart

Constant Dullaart, *1979 in Leiderdorp, The Netherlands
lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

„Loudly Crying Face“

Constant Dullaart displays a huge „Loudly Crying Face“ emoticon in the gallery space. According to Emojipedia, 😭 is, as of March 2021, the most popular emoji on Twitter. It shows a (usually yellow) face with an open mouth wailing and streams of heavy tears flowing from closed eyes. It may convey inconsolable grief but also other intense feelings, such as uncontrollable laughter, pride or overwhelming joy.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #34
New Viewings \ New Viewings #34

Aram Bartholl

Aram Bartholl, *1972 in Bremen, Germany
lives and works in Berlin, Germany

„walter_200 b3njamin’s Nightmare!!!111“

Aram Bartholl’s digital show, entitled “walter_200 b3njamin’s Nightmare!!!111“, consists of two different, seemingly simple elements: mirrors and boxes. The three mirrors display a collection of passwords, entitled „walter benjamin nightmare“, originating from the „Breech Collection #1-5“ consisting of sets of billions of email addresses and passwords freely downloadable from the dark web since 2019.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #34
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #34
Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #34

Nadja Buttendorf

Nadja Buttendorf, *1984 in Dresden, Germany
lives and works in Berlin, Germany

„Show Desktop Show“

Nadja Buttendorf’s „Show Desktop Show“ takes the artists’s desktop as a starting point which – surprise! – displays an image of Barbara Thumm‘s gallery space. Buttendorf’s works are shown as desktop icons scattered over the screen and at the same time hanging in the “gallery”. The trash bin icon is actually not an art work but the icon with the name “RPReplay_Final1620655064.MP4” that represents the video piece “Stay Home!”.

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Galerie Barbara Thumm \ New Viewings \ New Viewings #34

Sebastian Schmieg

Sebastian Schmieg, *1983 in Tübingen, Germany
lives and works in Berlin and Dresden, Germany

„Search by Image, Recursively“

Sebastian Schmieg’s show „Search by Image, Recursively“ consists of five videos displaying a multiplicity of images that follow each other at high speed. Each of the videos is a result of a Google image search which was carried out as a recursive search process in hundreds of steps. With the help of this process, videos were created in which the second image looks most similar to the first image, the third image looks most similar to the second image, and so on and so forth.

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