Known galleries - curation and exhibition Flashcards
Describe how your understanding of the artwork has been influenced by the curation and the exhibition of 2 different spaces you have visited this year - OS
The Australian Contemporary Centre of the Arts (ACCA), presented their exhibition ‘Data Relations’ in a modern yet simplistic gallery space.
- What is data relations about?
Data Relations features 4 installations, bringing together artist-led projects which wrestle with the challenges faced in a contemporary, data-driven society.
Inspired by the European kunsthalle, architect wood marsh built an exhibition hall specifically for contemporary works.
Rather than having 2 entry points, one was blocked off to create a central route to view all works.
- curator
The curator, Lauren Lee McCarthy, may have influenced the exhibition design by liaising with both the artists and the exhibition designer eg. discussing the floor plan/spacing of the artworks, whilst cataloguing photography/documentation of artworks and writing the didactics for the artworks.
- exhibition space upon entry
A sterile, surgical, almost futuristic scene was depicted upon entry of gallery space 1, creating an ambiguous atmosphere for the rest of the works.
2nd work - Winnie Soon
The second work in gallery 1, situated at the end of the exhibition space, was Winnie Soon’s ‘Unerasable Characters II,’ a dystopian installation consisting of custom-designed software that collated erased tweets from Chinese platform Weibo.
The large scale artwork, almost 8m high, featured a scattered array of symbols flashing on a projected screen, continuously churning and cycling through metadata in a rigid/robotic manner. The darkness of the overall space, contrasted by the illuminated characters and symbols, further exaggerated the intimidating size of the work (or perhaps the voices that were silenced as a consequence of censorship, implemented through technological platforms and infrastructure.)
1st work - Mimi Onuoha
Another work situated in gallery 2 was Mimi Onuoha’s ‘These Networks in Our Skin,’ a captivating video installation drawing on traditional symbolism and logo cosmology. Drawing from her Nigerian roots, Onuoha describes her work as ‘algorithmic violence,’ highlighting the dehumanising impact of exclusion of minorities as a result of data in the media.
Through a twisted body of cables, sprinkled with traditional spices such as cinnamon, a fragrant aroma was released into the art space, further connoting to Onuoha’s idea of data affecting cultures all around the world.
Final sentence - Onuoha
This was further reinforced by the vibrant wall colour in Dulux - temptress, continuing to intensify Onuoha’s hypothetical vision of the impacts of data on a more global scale.
