screenshots of the rooms
© Prater Galerie

© Prater Galerie

Exhibition

POST NORMAL

30.06. – 31.12.2022

The Prater Gallery has invited artists to explore the challenges of a digital exhibition space, and to try out their own work in the Prater Digital rooms. Taking their own artistic works as a basis, the artists have discovered different ways of approaching the digital gallery space.

The exhibition title POST NORMAL is borrowed from the work by Sharon Paz. It refers to the concept of ‘postnormal times’ (PNT) developed by Ziauddin Sardar. In 2010, Sardar described the present day as an interim phase during which old orthodoxies would die out while new ones were still to be born – a phase during which very little would appear to make sense. The digital space permits the playful abolition of the boundaries imposed in physical space. After all, who can make objects float in mid-air in the physical space, as Juliane Tübke does in her piece? Or deconstruct architecture entirely, like Michelle-Marie Letelier in her work, in which the digital gallery space is continually and increasingly disrupted? Starting from our bodily experiences and the limitations imposed in the physical space, we must still learn to move anew in the digital space. As a municipal gallery, we are investigating ways to operate in the digital space. It is with the aim of exploring this together with artists and the public that we have set up the digital residencies whose results we present in this exhibition.

TEAM
Curator: Katharina von Hagenow
Coding and Design Mozilla Hubs galery room: Studio für unendliche Möglichkeiten (Gloria Schulz (Lead), Julian Kamphausen, Konstantin Andörfer, Vadim Smakthin)
Technical support and documentation of residencies: Abdulsalam Ajaj
Prater Galerie: Tereza Havlíková, Lena Prents und Julie Rüter

Weathering

Juliane Tübke

In her long-term project Weathering, Tübke investigates the influence of weather/water on people and their surroundings. The study starts in the port city of Kochi (Kerala, India), where she began interviewing people on the subject of weather three years ago. The resulting narratives form the basis for the website Weathering With Me, which Tübke has now adapted into spatial form in the exhibition spaces of Prater Digital. Details from the watercolour series Cochin Tides float like clouds over the scene in a hallway, while casts of weathered surfaces from the interviewees’ surroundings are displayed in the room.

Crystals are the Flashpoint of a Benthic Dream

Michelle Marie Letelier

Throughout the residency, Letelier created digital atmospheres by placing the gallery space ‘under water’. Crystalline formations eat into the walls of the gallery space, which is continually and increasingly disrupted. Letelier here focuses on the metaphorical significance of crystals to information technology and combines this with her current artistic engagement with the benthic zone and the virtual world of her work The Bone.

There are three transformation phases in all. Each room contains a mirror, behind which is a link to the next room. To return, please save the link to this room to the clipboard.

Hannah and Martin | Post Normal

Sharon Paz

Sharon Paz experiments with a variety of formats and manipulates history with contemporary images and texts. Working on the basis of an imagined conversation, she now illuminates various aspects of the complex relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Through a range of digital scenarios, the protagonists engage in a dialogue composed of existing, theoretical and freely invented texts. In her work, Paz sends us on a voyage of the imagination, between truth and fiction.

Heat Island: The wonderful heartfelt sentiment

D’Andrade

D’Andrade has developed for Prater Digital a poem that unfolds in a sequence of Mozilla Hubs rooms. It includes acoustic compositions, 3D designs and dialogues about a healing process conducted through digital media and virtual realities. The poem tells the story of a child who died too young, and now lives on in a virtual world, as part of an archive of human memories. Out of this emerges a fictional digital archive relating to the history of humankind, and dominated by the effects of climate change, forced migration and sudden separations.

Pattern Recognition

Veneta Androva

Androva has created a walkable narrative in Prater Digital. She presents a vision of the future in which robots are processing familiar portraits of white male figures. Texts generated using GPT-3 are heard in the room, giving the impression of hymns of praise to the men portrayed. The work’s title refers to the capacity to recognise repetitions and patterns in a mass of data – in this instance, the word ‘genius’, which surfaces again and again in reference to the figures illustrated. Androva interrogates the cult of male genius, which has written itself into the databases and accordingly also echoes in the texts generated by AI.

Veneta Androva

Veneta Androva born in Sofia, Bulgaria, graduated in Fine Arts from Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin in 2019. She also obtained a degree in History of Art and Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin. Androva is the recipient of several scholarships, such as Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship, Artist Scholarship from Cusanuswerk, Mart Stam Scholarship and was nominated in 2020 with her work ‘From My Desert’ for the German Short Film Award. Recently she received Prix Ars Electronica 2021 – Award of Distinction for her film ‘AIVA’ in category ‘Computer Animation’, as well as Golden Horseman for Animated Film and LUCA Gender Diversity Award at Filmfest Dresden. Androva participated in numerous exhibitions at national and international venues, including DISPLAY (Berlin), CyberArt 2021 – Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition (Linz), Goethe-Institute Sofia (BG), Galeria Espacio Minimo (Madrid), Institute of Contemporary Art (Sofia), Monitoring Exhibition (Kassel DokFest).

D’Andrade

D’Andrade is a non-binary musician*, poet* and writer* whose conceptual approach is oriented towards Afro-futurism and decolonial theory, as well as the development of investigative works, new and counter-narratives through sound design, coding, archives, and interactions. D’Andrade co-curated the interdisciplinary festival “Jardim Suspenso” in Brazil and founded the solo project “Noise Vivarium” in 2020, based on open workshops with sound experiments, decoloniality, and nature. D’Andrades works have been exhibited at international venues as well as in Berlin, including the Sophiensälen, feldfünf, nGbK, Iwalwahaus, and the AKE ARTS & BOOK FESTIVAL in Nigeria.

Michelle-Marie Letelier

Born in Rancagua, Chile, Michelle-Marie Letelier currently lives and works in Berlin. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Universidad Católica de Chile in 2000. In Berlin, she was a participant in the Gloldrausch female artist project. Letelier’s work has been exhibited internationally, including: GropiusBau (Berlin); Kunstmuseum Bonn; Stanislavsky Elecrotheater (Moscow); Screen City Biennial 2019 (Stavanger, Norway); El Museo de Los Sures (New York); Kunsthalle 3,14 (Bergen); Museum of Contemporary Arts (Santiago). Her VR and video works have been shown at international festivals: The Arctic Arts Festival (Harstad); Videonale.18 (Bonn); VRHAM! Festival (Hamburg/Online); WE ARE OCEAN (Berlin and Marseille); East Asia Contemporary Art Space (Shanghai); 5th Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre) and X Video and Media Arts Biennial (Santiago).

Sharon Paz

Born in 1969 in Ramat Gan, Israel, the artist Sharon Paz now lives and works in Berlin. She graduated with an MFA in fine arts from Huter College in New York City. She has shown her work in exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Wesenburg in Bremen, Smack Mellon in New York City, the Herzlyia Museum of Art and the Petach-Tikva Museum of Art in Israel, and at numerous festivals including Transmediale 11 in Berlin.

Juliane Tübke

studied art history in a global context at the Freie Universität Berlin before transferring to the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2018, she completed her studies with Prof. Monica Bonvicini there and was subsequently awarded the President’s Prize of the UdK Berlin. For her mostly site-specific projects, she has been invited to international residencies such as most recently the 2019 bangaloREsidency in India (Goethe-Institut). Tübke’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (2020), Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (2019), and Pepper House/Kochi Biennale Foundation in India (2019). The artist lives and works in Berlin.