Background image: Femke Herregraven: The murmur of the dying (2023), still. Video. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers, State of Concept Athens and Swiss Institute New York
Before the official opening of the exhibition Attention After Technology, we are pleased to invite you to join a conversation with three of the artists in the exhibition and the curators Stefanie Hessler and Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen.
The doors to the exhibition open at 5 pm and from 5.30 you can meet the artists biarritzzz, Femke Herregraven and Berenice Olmedo when they present their brand new works created especially for the exhibition. Here will you get a unique insight into their process of creating the commissioned works, which started with the artist participating in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators, the associated partner collective The Friends of Attention (an informal network of creative collaborators), and advisors from diverse disciplines including computer science and artificial intelligence, visual arts, and queer and trans technology studies.
The event will be held in English and is free and open for all.
Welcome <3
––––––
Participant biographies:
biarritzzz (b. 1994, lives and works in Recife, Brazil) is an anti-disciplinary transmedia artist who believes in magic and low resolution as important counter-narratives to live the current cosmological dispute of realities. She has exhibited in Pivô, A.I.R Gallery, The Wrong Biennale, FILE, The Shed NY, among others. Her works integrate Rhizome Artbase (New Museum), KADIST Foundation, IMS, and MIS-SP (Museu da Imagem e do Som de São Paulo) permanent collections. biarritzzz’s video installation in Attention After Technology surveys tactics ranging from opacity to hypervisibility, as well as tensions between privacy and overexposure, in the memetic spread of Brazilian baile funk choreographies created by TikTok users.
With her work, Femke Herregraven (b. 1982) focuses on the effects of abstract value systems on ecosystems, historiography and individual lives. This research is the basis for the conception of new characters, stories, objects, sculptures, sound, video, and installations. In her recent work she explores the conceptualisation of the future as a ‘catastrophe' and uses the voice, the respiratory system, and code to examine these calculated and monetized eventualities that haunt our social, biological, and technological ecosystems. In this exhibition, Herregraven’s work brings together issues surrounding the voice, breath, disease, and death with AI. Her work explores machine learning programs trained on language and the absence thereof in human vocalizations during illness that are located outside the spectrum of standardized communication.
Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987 in Oaxaca, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. Berenice is known for her sculptures and kinetic objects, in which she often integrates prostheses and orthotics. Her fusions of body parts challenge the notion of human wholeness and draw attention to the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care. The artist engages with standardized expectations of our bodies and explores the extent to which external aids are essential to human existence. By reusing forms and materials from the medical field, she challenges the pursuit of efficiency and seamless perfection in favor of a more physical, political, and existential contemporary experience. Berenice Olmedo shows a projection coming out of a keratometer (an ophthalmic testing device) delves into the continued emphasis on our optical sense in engaging with digital spaces. Via the metaphor of visual acuity, Olmedo evokes surveillance capitalism’s use of biometric identification as well as issues of profiling and data privacy.
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, editor, and current Director of Swiss Institute (SI), an independent non-profit contemporary art institution in New York. At SI, she and the team are centering environmental consciousness in all facets of the institution, ranging from changes that reduce the organization's carbon footprint to its artistic programming, with the understanding that this process is imperfect but urgent. Previously, as the Director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, Hessler co-led the critically acclaimed research-based exhibition, Sex Ecologies, and edited the accompanying compendium on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds (with Seed Box and MIT Press, 2021). Hessler has been a visiting research scholar at Westminster University in London, curator of TBA21–Academy in Vienna and London, and guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Selected projects as an independent curator include the 17th MOMENTA Biennale, Sensing Nature, Montreal (chief curator); Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II, Ocean Space, Venice; the symposium Practices of Attention, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (co-curator); the 6th Athens Biennale (co-curator); and Tidalectics, TBA21–Augarten, Vienna. Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (The MIT Press, 2019), and has edited over a dozen volumes including Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (The MIT Press, 2018) and Life Itself (Moderna Museet and Koenig Books, 2016). Hessler is a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) New York, currently serves on the advisory board of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), and forms a part of the "On Seeing Editorial Collective" between The MIT Press and the Brown University Library.
Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen is an art historian and curator based in Trondheim, Norway. She earned her MA in Art History at the University of Oslo. Her art historical research has often centered on the body in performative contexts and its artistic strategies. Pedersen functioned as Interim Director at Kunsthall Trondheim May–December 2022, whereas she holds the position as Curator. Pedersen’s curatorial practice focuses on perspectives combining alternative realities, spiritualties, knowledge systems and technology; as well as other narratives that have been given little focus throughout Western art history. She has recently explored themes of diasporic ancestry, neuroplasticity, and memory – an inquiry motivated by her own experiences as a second-generation Filipina immigrant in Norway. Pedersen is Vice Chair of The Norwegian Association of Curators.
___
Project coordinator: Kunsthall Trondheim
The project is led by: Kunsthall Trondheim and Swiss Institute New York
Partners: Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and State of Concept Athens
Associate Partners: The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris), and Swiss Institute New York
Co-funded by the European Union
Advisory committee for the artists: Pedro Victor Brandão, Kate Crawford, Flavia Dzodan, Whit Pow, Joana Souza
Project Ambassador Trondheim: Gulabuddin Sukhanwar
Curatorial team
Kunsthall Trondheim:
Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, Curator and Project Manager for Attention After Technology (with Stefanie Hessler, Swiss Institute New York)
Liz Dom, Project Manager for Attention After Technology
Kaja Grefslie Waagen, Producer and Communications Manager
Art Hub Copenhagen:
Lars Bang Larsen, Head of Art & Research
Rose Tytgat, Project Coordinator
Susanne Hviid, Administrative Director
Jacob Fabricius, Artistic Director
Fafaya Mogensen, Project Manager
Marie Braad Larsen, Curator
Nikolaj Phillipsen, Arrangements Coordinator
Stine Nørgaard Lykkebo, Communications Manager
Jan Mäkelä Wallin, Economy
Tropical Papers:
María Inés Rodríguez
Mariana Vieira Marcondes
Andres Sandoval Alba
Yu Hsiaoh Hwei
State of Concept Athens:
iLiana Fokianaki, Founder and Director
Konstantina Melachrinou, Production Manager and Press Officer
Swiss Institute New York:
Stefanie Hessler, Director, curatorial concept and Project Manager for Attention After Technology (with Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, Kunsthall Trondheim)
Alison Coplan, Senior Curator and Program Manager
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
The exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim is additionally supported by SpareBank 1 SMN, Arts and Culture Norway, The Fritt Ord Foundation, Mondriaan Fund and IDM Dispenser.