Talk

Mila Askarova and Claudia Hart

16 Dec 2020

Regular hours

Wed, 16 Dec
18:30 – 19:15

Timezone: Europe/London

Cost of entry

£5 per entry or donation

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Hosted by: Agora Digital Art

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Digital Art: engaging beyond the screen - Mila Askarova and Claudia Hart

About

Why should I attend?

You will have a chance to visit the new series An Imaginary Ruin in Hubs. The pre-recorded discussion tour is filmed in a “Cinéma Vérité” style, in which you will gain an authentic insight into the Hart-curated VR world.

Furthermore, you will discover how Claudia Hart, a pioneer in New Media and VR, collaborated with Mila Askarova, the founder of Gazelli Art House and Gazell.io. Her residency covers about 25 years in digital art creation.

Through conversations with Claudia and Mila, we aim to learn more about the impact of new technology on the contemporary art scene.

About the speakers:

Mila Askarova

Mila Askarova was born and raised in Azerbaijan before settling in London in 2002. She graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she studied International Relations BSc. Having worked in the Client Development department at Sotheby’s, Mila pursued her further studies at Central Saint Martins and Christie’s Education, gaining a theoretical insight into Collecting Contemporary Art, Independent Curating and Art Business.

In 2010, Mila found Gazelli Art House in London as an additional space to its Baku gallery, which was found in 2003. After hosting conceptually interlinked off-site exhibitions across London, the gallery’s permanent space on Dover Street was opened. Gazelli Art House grew to support a wide range of international artists and in 2017, the redesigned gallery space in Baku reopened with an ambitious annual program showcasing both local and international artists including to date El Anatsui, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franz Ackermann and Richard Wilson.

Claudia Hart

Claudia Hart emerged as part of that generation of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche, but now updated through the scrim of technology. Her work is about issues of the body, perception, nature collapsing into technology and then back again. Everything is fluid in it including gender. She considers it Cyborg-ish, creating liminal spaces, and is in love with the interface between real and unreal because it is space of contemplation and transformation.

Hart was very early into virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, and objects using computer-driven production machines, all adapted from the same computer models. She is considered a pioneer in this, taking a feminist position in a world without women when she started 20 years ago, inspired by the French media artists of the 60s.

Hart produces real things, not just mediated ones, meaning “mediated objects” (digitally enabled sculptures, drawings, paintings, wallpaper, conceptual crafts), and projections on painted walls, and ultimately on human bodies wearing sculptural screens of some sort. She produces bodies of work shown in galleries that then inspire performances that, for the past five years, have been shown in the experimental theatre and performance context.

Hart’s work is symbolist and poetic, not really narrative, but vaguely so, and is mesmerizing, hypnotic and formalist. Bodies or natural forms like flowers always appear in it. Hart calls her work, “post-photography,” and has created a body of theoretic writings and exhibitions based on this concept The things in her worlds are generated from computer models instead of captured with a camera. At SAIC, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept. It is called Experimental 3D and is the first art-school curriculum teaching simulations technologies in the art world.

She lives in both New York and Chicago, shows with Transfer and Bitforms galleries and is married to the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager.

In 2015, the gallery launched its Digital Art House www.gazell.io, an online residency for artists working in the digital and virtual reality realm. On an annual basis, curated shows titled “Enter Through the Headset” are held to feature select previous residents in the physical space of the gallery.

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Isabella Helms

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Claudia Hart

Taking part

Agora Digital Art

Agora Digital Art

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