Panel discussion | Gridded gardens and virtual ships of fools

About

Verena Issel stages a maze – or is it a cage? – in a gridded room in which everything natural is made and arranged from plastic and other synthetic materials. In Roy Mordechay's work, ships of fools, Jewish hats and totem poles meet as if in an aquarium – or is it the background of a screen? The work of both artists combines motifs from art history and different cultures with a reflection of today's political realities and our digital environment.

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Bodies, Grids and Ecstasy

Margret Eicher, Beate Gütschow, Verena Issel, Inna Levinson, Roy Mordechay, Katja Novitskova, Pavel Pepperstein, Pieter Schoolwerth, Lena Schramm

Exhibition: November 1, 2023 – April 20, 2024

Curator: Ludwig Seyfarth

What becomes of physical reality in a world that is increasingly pervaded by digital processes? Exploring this question, the exhibition confronts us with surprising encounters – and contradictions – between surface and space, abstraction and matter, reality and fiction. We come across images, objects and sculptures in which things come together or are pieced together that as such are not compatible – in other words, collages with invisible seams.

Is everything that fails to fit into a calculable grid at some point no more than remnant analogue matter, discarded like refuse? Or does it become something located beyond our horizon, similar to how our three-dimensional world would appear to the inhabitants of a two-dimensional flatland?

The exhibition shows various artistic paths that lead away from the gridded flatland of a computer screen, a sheet of paper or a wall, back into a world of haptic, corporeal experience and narration. These might run in straight lines that take an unusual course or be convoluted, humorous and enigmatic. Included here may also be a subtle or direct critique of digital capitalism.