Johanna Reich

In her project “The Ethics of Coding – Famous Artworks censored by Facebook”, JOHANNA REICH examines the role of censorship in social networks. This throws up many questions about the ethics of coding: as social networks form our society, values such as transparency, data sovereignty and the understanding of underlying algorithmic procedures are indispensable.

In recent years, Facebook has censored countless classic artworks because they depicted nudes. This is because the algorithm originally designed to recognise pornography cannot tell the difference between pornographic, artistic and documentary depictions of nudity. As a result, artworks such as the Venus of Willendorf, paintings by Rubens, Courbet, Goya and Tizian or the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen are censored in the same way as child pornography. In her video performance, JOHANNA REICH produces ink drawings in which the censored parts of famous nudes in art history are marked.


France

Paris

PRISKA PASQUER GALLERY

Drawing

The Ethics of Coding Famous Artworks censored by Facebook between 2011-2019 Venus of Urbino, Titian

Famous Artworks censored by Facebook between 2011-2019 Venus vor dem Spiegel, Velazquez

Mirjam Baker

MIRJAM BAKER is an artist and film-maker. She has already won numerous awards for her animated films. Her new 13-minute film “Staub” is based on almost 200 pastel drawings. BAKER created the monochrome works with innovative, extra-fine pastel colours that permit exceptionally nuanced colour effects. The pastel drawings created in this way are astonishing in their density and spatial depth.

In the film sequence, these individual pictures are condensed into pulsating colour spaces that carry space and time relationships into a whole new dimension. This gives rise to a “colour film” in the truest sense of the word. Developed with bass flautist Angelika Sheridan, the soundtrack’s dynamic monotony ties in with the animated monochromy of these coloured areas.


Staub

The Ethics of Coding Famous Artworks censored by Facebook between 2011-2019, Grande Odalisque, Ingres

Radenko Milak

In his paintings and animated films – mostly watercolours with black pigment – RADENKO MILAK analyses the role of contemporary image production in the formation of our historical and cultural memory. The Bosnian artist’s painting work centres on questions relating to how visual elements are fixed and stored – both in personal memories and as presented in the media of film and photography.

The motifs grouped together here deal with the conquering of the world and space by man. After the initial observation stage (camera obscura, observatories) came the gradual conquest of airspace (airships, aeroplanes), before man ultimately ventured into space in the form of unmanned and manned space travel.

As a template for his black-and-white watercolours, RADENKO MILAK chose iconic shots such as Count Zeppelin’s flight over the pyramids of Giza (1931), the start of the unmanned test flight Mercury-Atlas 4 (1961) or the Avrocar “flying saucer” in the NASA Ames Research Center (1961). The series culminated in a selfie being taken on Mars by NASA’s Mars Rover on 23 January 2018.


Painting

Mercury Atlas 4 was an unmanned spaceflight of the Mercury program. It was launched on September 13, 1961

Earliest known correct schematic of the human visual system - illustation from the Book of Optics - Ibn Al-Haytham

Avrocar with tail, mounted on variable height struts in the NASA March 3, 1961

K-Class Airship

Supersonic Wind Tunnel at what is now the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH

The Lunar Rendezvous Simulator at Langley Research Center

Construction of Model 1 used in the LO LA simulator

Albrecht Schäfer

The work of ALBRECHT SCHÄFER is characterised by minimal intervention and reduced means. With a sure feel for objects, he explores their inner logic and the aesthetic potential of their materials while invalidating conventional usage patterns. He is not interested in appropriating “everyday objects” for art or in using his art for the purposes of provocation. Rather, SCHÄFER examines objects with attention, respect and curiosity.

Among the objects that ALBRECHT SCHÄFER regularly explores are daily newspapers: “Parallel to a simple reading of the newspaper’s content, I read the newspaper itself, as medium or material. And I read it in the original sense of the word as gathering or selecting – so I don’t read in the sense of a semantic deciphering of signs, but in the sense of selecting certain properties or levels that I want to make visible.” For instance, he cut an edition of French newspaper “Le Monde” into tiny pieces and used wallpaper paste to make it into a globe.


Collage

Le Monde,  2 juillet 2019

The Ethics of Coding Famous Artworks censored by Facebook between 2011-2019 La liberté guidant le peuple, Delacroix

Astrid Klein & Rudolf Bonvie

In their joint work, “fremd” (foreign) from 1994, ASTRID KLEIN and RUDOLF BONVIE examine the notion of foreignness and its extensive, existential meaning. It does not just focus on “others” but also on self-awareness and identification.

“Fremd” consists of seven vertical-format mirrors, the reflective layer of which has been partly ground off. Each of the “images” is composed of the same elements: stripes arranged in various proportions and sequences, giving rise to seven variants of a basic pattern. The dominant element is a writing volume that reproduces the word “fremd” in various languages and photographic images. The letters are fuzzy – in some cases extremely blurred – and shown in mirror writing.

With some parts blackened, others transparent or mirrored, and with the distorted typography and multilingualism, these “reflected images” challenge us to re-examine the socially and personally virulent notion of “foreignness”.


Mixed Media

Fremd

Charlotte Triebus

In her mixed media installation “is a rose”, CHARLOTTE TRIEBUS addresses romanticised images of monitoring and the controversial question, much debated in sociological circles, as to whether authority to act can be given to non-human organisms and inanimate objects.

The installation consists of nine hanging plants, the roots of which are growing in a ball of moss, and of a tracking system and LED monitor. The plants register the movement of visitors through their leaves. A monitor records these seismographic impressions of the plants and, from these, modulates in real time a raster graphic depicting a sphere turning on its own axis.


is a rose

We live in a changing world. The breakneck speed of digitalisation and globalisation processes is putting paid to familiar structures. Polarities fragment into complex diversities, while hierarchical orders crumble, only to meld into a networked coexistence on an equal footing.

How can we understand this new world, which is now beyond the grasp of our old way of thinking? What questions are being asked now and what hypotheses can help us to find answers? Maybe art has the answers? After all, artists have always been the seismographs of society, responding to the challenges of radically changing times and developing alternative visions.

One of the most hotly debated present-day questions is that of diversity, equality and justice. Sociologists and politicians explore this question, as do philosophers, economists and – needless to say – artists. In art, of course, polarised thinking has already been largely transcended and coexistence on equal terms is often axiomatic.

Future structures need openness and flexibility. The exhibitions at PRISKA PASQUER also correspond with these principles, as for most part they devote themselves to a single theme over a longer period of time. Seen as a process rather than a statement, they make no claims, but ask questions instead. The artworks shown there open up new possibilities for thinking and discussion. Repeated exposure in particular often allows new ideas to develop.

In the exhibition series “ON EQUAL TERMS”, PRISKA PASQUER brings together artistic works and projects that address this thematic issue. The series of exhibitions already illustrates this on a formal level by consciously juxtaposing works of such diverse media as video, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, photography or digital art.

“ON EQUAL TERMS” presents works by artists that experiment with the notion of equal status and of a new sense of community in our globally networked world. In doing so, they set off on roads less trodden like lateral thinker Alexander von Humboldt who, with his explorations and contacts around the world, already lived in a globalised world and thought in holistic terms back in the early 19th century.

In a way, the exhibition takes up where the three-part “RESET” (2015-2017) left off in that it deals with artistic reflection on the far-reaching developments of the digital age. Under the maxim “Art in a Changing World”, PRISKA PASQUER compared contemporary art with modernity, Bauhaus, Italian futurism and virtual spaces against the backdrop of the digital age.

“ON EQUAL TERMS” takes this one step further, examining how today’s artists are free to think in new correlations without being constricted by prejudice, how they deal with networked communication models and how they reconcile equality with diversity. In a world in which traditional ideas and outlooks are lost in the maelstrom of new technologies and discoveries, artists can ask the right questions and confront us with things that we might not understand at the time but may at some point in the future.

On Equal Terms II

On Equal Terms II

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