Art in a Suitcase – video pocket
Science, my muse
Participating artists: Andrew Mezvinsky, Eva Petrič, Eva Schlegel, Nikolaus Gansterer, Robert Bodnar, Tilen Žbona, Uršula Berlot
This exhibition of video artworks is some kind of a record of a soft and gentle influence of science on artistic thought and expression. It is a story about how science can inspire the art and how the art breaks down the rigidity of scientific rules and offers back the freedom of imagination and interpretation of reality. It is almost some kind of a love story between the two most important human activities that involve both rational and intuitive thinking in their processes. Today the challenge is to survive and cooperate with nature and the most feasible solution is a total cooperation or melting again the spiritual work scientists and artist do.
The link between sciences and arts is old, very old. It is old as culture itself going back to the cave painting, where the painter, the artist definitely was some kind of a scientist as well. But the cave age is distant in the physical, temporal aspect as well as conceptual and for common understanding of the intimate bond between art and science today renaissance serves the best and with it perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. While Leonardo, the last homo universalis, seems like a synonym of art and science as one entity, the time in which this genius lived, was the time when what we now understand as art split from the human activity we understand as science.
Although the artists kept track of contemporary discoveries of science all the time, the gap between them grew in time. It is a socio-economical phenomenon the diversification and autonomization of fields of production and knowledge that started to increase even more with enlightenment and industrial revolution. For the relationship between arts and sciences it culminated towards the end of the 20th century through promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in education as the most important knowledge for the progress of a society. Only recently art is coming back into the education system and also numerous science institutions like ESA and CERN for example are introducing art projects and exhibitions at their sites as well as involving artists in scientific researches for years already. And this is not only to help to better visualise scientific concepts but as an enhancement for the imagination in the complexity of concepts. Besides in the past 20 years number of artists that get involved with scientists at creating artworks is growing potentially because special knowledge is required to operate and understand the advanced technologies that shape humanity, society and individual bodies and minds.
Venues:
24. 1. 2023, C3 – Centro de Cienias de la Complejidad (UNAM), Ciudad de Mexico
27. 1. – 28. 2. 2023, AETHER Gallery, San Luis Potosí
The artists:
Andrew Mezvinsky
The Crude Randomness of the Mind
American artist working across many media examining what is lost in that interstitial transit between what is expressed and what is perceived? A trained painter and draughtsman, Mezvinsky explores these concerns within the historical and material framework of the pictorial plane. Through formal methods of cutting, dissecting, suturing, and display, he approaches the two-dimensional surface with the surgical precision of an archaeologist to spatialize and make visible the crudest elements of experience perpetually lost in translation. All with a touch of irony.
Mezvinsky’s work has been exhibited globally in numerous galleries and institutions including the Judisches Museum, Vienna, The Lenbachhaus, Munich and the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York.
www.andrewmezvinsky.com
Eva Petrič
Feeling Science
Born in Slovenia, lives and works between New York City, Vienna, and Ljubljana, creating works in photography, video, performance, installation, sound and writing. In New York, Eva is presented by Galerie Mourlot – New York. She holds a BA in psychology and visual arts from Webster University Vienna, and an MFA in new media, from Transart Institute New York /Berlin. Her art has been shown in over 90 solo and 140 group exhibitions all over the world, receiving numerous recognitions and awards.
Participating in various medical procedures, such as explanation and transplantation of organs to not just acquaint myself with the facts, but also feel them, I search for the contemporary means of surpassing the borders of our bodies. For this purpose, I also borrowed the periodic table of chemical elements from the natural sciences and replaced them with shadows, visualizing and catalyzing for emotions, resulting in my Periodic Table of Shadowed Emotions and Gr@y Matter – language of shadows opus.
This video is an ode to the periodic table of elements – the material of life!
www.eva-petric-evacuate.com
Eva Schlegel
See the invisible
Born 1960, lives and works in Vienna
1979-85 graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under the aegis of Oswald Oberhuber
1997-2006 Professor of Art and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
2011 Commissioner for the Austrian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011
Eva Schlegel’s work includes photography, objects, but also installation works, which are implemented experimentally and spatially by using different media such as photography on lead, mirror or glass. She questions the limits of perception of common viewing habits. Since 1995, Eva Schlegel has completed numerous public art projects in Austria and abroad.
www.evaschlegel.com
Nikolaus Gansterer (with Erin Manning)
Translecture on Minor Gesture
(of a live performance with done at the MSK – Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium in 2016)
is an artist interested in the links between drawing, thinking and action. In his trans-medial work, he is diagramming emergent processes of sense making unfolding their immanent structures of interconnectedness, questioning the threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy. He is the author of Drawing a Hypothesis, 2011 on the ontology of visualising processes of thinking. Since 2007 he is teaching at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and is internationally active with numerous performances and exhibitions.
www.gansterer.org
www.erinmovement.com
Robert Bodnar
Heliocentric
Born in Prague and currently lives in Vienna. He studied photography and flm at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He exhibits regularly at individual exhibitions in the international area and in curated group exhibitions.
Artist interested in the *Photographic Condition* – the intersection of light, material, process, artistic research
robertbodnar.com
Tilen Žbona
The sound of materialization-Line and yellow spot 52/2
Born on 31.8.1976 in Koper (Slovenia). In 2001 he graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Italy, where he studied painting. In 2007 he completed his masters in Video and New Media at the Academy of fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2017 he obtained his PhD in “The Use of New Media within Spatial Design at Elementary School” from Faculty of Education in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Currently he is Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia. He lives and works between Ljubljana and Koper.
AWARDS: in 2011, the Senate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana awarded him the recognition of important works of art in the field of video and new media.
Uršula Berlot
Suspension (Circle-Square)
Sound: Scanner – Robin Rimbaud
Born in Ljubljana, she graduated from the Secondary School of Natural Science. She studied two years of philosophy at the Philosophy Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana before studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Ljubljana and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2002, she earned a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana and finished her doctoral study in 2010 at the same institution. Since 2009 she is teaching at the Chair of theoretical studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana.
She works as a visual artist, theorist of art and lecturer, with an interest in the intersections of art and science. Her artistic practice is related to perception and conditions of consciousness, her light and kinetic installations investigate forms of cerebral landscapes, simulated nature and relationships between body and technology.
ursulaberlot.com