Place Crisis
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Curated by Wyatt Niehaus.
“Place Crisis was one leg of a three part series entitled Material Conversion that took place at the Grimmuseum in Berlin, in December 2011. The exhibition featured work from Martin Kohout, Manuel Bürger, Justin Kemp, Daniel Michel, Chris Collins, and Anjali Alm-Basu.
Place Crisis focused on the material shift in space and objecthood in the advent of new media- taking into account virtual exhibition models, hybrid-objects, dual sites, and other emerging concepts regarding the visual display of new media objects. This exhibition addresses the crisis of redefinition regarding materiality and immateriality. To define materiality post-internet is to define objects and spaces which, simply put, have the capability to affect and interact with other objects and spaces. This denotation is necessarily broad in order to deliver accurately all that we must consider “real”, in contemporary image-making. To parse these terms in the 21st century is to redefine virtuality and physicality as being two pieces of the same experience. Assigning this criteria to the production of contemporary art allows us to radically redefine the ways in which we group and disseminate art and media, and under which standards pieces are gathered and contextualized. In this circumstance, a shift has occurred, and data (in the form of actions, objects, situations, and spaces) flows in between physicality and virtuality with little to no distinction.
The goal of this exhibition was to explore the methods in which contemporary image-makers are working to assemble a set of new visual principles by producing hybrid objects which push the viewer to reassess and re-qualify how we define media in a time of extreme technological proliferation. The questions raised by these works are both conceptual and formal in nature, and require us to think about the visual processes in a new light. Our goal is a kind of trend analysis and forecasting- taking into account the brief history of this exchange and exploring old options, new options and current manifestations of net-spaces, physical spaces, and textual spaces.” – Wyatt Niehaus