Alexandre Joly, 2023, Ville subaquatique et mondes parallèles - M4, soundpiece created for (re)connecting.earth, 17'26.

artwork by Alexandre Joly created for the Biennial of art and urban nature (re)connecting.earth (02) - Beyond Water

In this podcast we speak with Chinese artist Zheng Bo about social participative practices, a post-anthropocentric world, the meaning of knowledge in both Western and Chinese culture, and the current political situation in a time of pandemic and multipolarization of powers.

Zheng Bo’s biography and artistic practice give insight on his plurilocal experience between the US, Mainland China and Hong Kong. With the experience of different political environments, he developed a practice oriented with social engaged art and added a main focus since nearly a decade on botany and ecosystem. Through videos, installations, and workshops he develops a non-anthropocentric perspective in which he proposes the notion of interspecies communities and publics.

After spending one year of military service in the Chinese army, studying computer science and art in the US, visual art in Hong Kong and a PhD in Visual Studies under Douglas Crimp in the University of Rochester he taught in the City University of Hong Kong and China Academy of Fine art, so in many other art schools as a guest lecturer. In this podcast we speak with him about social participative practices, a post-anthropocentric world, the meaning of knowledge in both Western and Chinese culture, and the current political situation in a time of pandemic and multipolarization of powers.

For the complete transcript of the conversation: https://www.art-werk.ch/de/journal/zheng-bo-how-can-we-think-beyond-human-exceptionalism

Interview: Bernard Vienat

Audio editing: Christina Huber

Copy editing and transcript: Sofia Leiby

For this eighth episode, we welcome Berlin based artist Andreas Greiner. His art draws on biology, biotechnology, and questions the impact of humans on other living forms. After studying medicine, anatomy and sculpture he focuses on time-based and sculptural art works.The content of his work focuses on the anthropogenic influence on nature’s evolution and form. He is part of the artist collectives A / A and Das Numen.

At a time when few people spoke about right-wing violence, it was already on Henrike Naumann’s mind. The artist reacted directly to current events–the resurgence of nationalist violence, and the discovery of the terrorist underground network NSU.

She combines secondhand furniture from the 80s and 90s and makes videos which she integrates in her immersive installations. They tell stories of old and new fascism as well as of youth cultures during globalisation.

Only a few days after the terror attack in the German city of Hanau, and with the right on the rise in German parliaments, we visited her studio on the outskirts of Berlin Neukölln, where we met her for coffee. We talked about the mediation of history via art, the allegorical power of furniture, bad taste and bad politics.

Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau, German Democratic Republic, in 1984. The artist now lives and works in Berlin. In her immersive installations she arranges furniture and home decor into spaces interspersed with video and sound work. Her work speaks about social and political issues as they are reflected in domestic interiors and through the ambivalent aesthetics of taste.

Growing up in Eastern Germany, Naumann experienced far right ideology as a predominant youth culture in the 1990s. Therefore, she is interested in the mechanisms of radicalization and how they are linked to personal experience. Although rooted in her experiences in Germany, Naumann’s work has addressed the global connectivity of youth cultures and their role in the process of cultural othering. (For further biographical details and more pictures: https://www.art-werk.ch/fr/podcast/henrike-naumann-how-did-objects-lose-their-innocence

We visited the exhibition “Farsight Freeport” which is the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Lawrence Lek. At the Haus der Elektronischen Künste in Basel, or HEK in short, we met the co-curator of the show, Boris Magrini.

Lek takes us on a journey through time. Visitors enter a setting which transports them to the year 2065. They discover a time in which artificial intelligence dominates and controls all areas of social, industrial and economic life.

Lawrence Lek is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and musician based in London. Born in Frankfurt am Main of Malaysian and Chinese descent, he studied architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge; the Architectural Association in London, and Cooper Union in New York. In his films, we see an interest in futurist architecture, which creates a setting for imagined future societies.

For the final episode of our Venice Special, we’d like to take you to the pavilion of New Zealand. It is housed in the Palazzina Canonica, right by the bank of the Canale Grande. However, the work by the artist Dane Mitchell is not immediately visible. The corridors and staircases of the Neo-Renaissance palace built in 1911 are empty, safe for the occasional piece of furniture. At the heart of the building, there is the library, whose walls are lined with dark, wooden bookshelves. They, too, are empty. Only in the middle of the well-lit room, is a rack with a printer on top which spews out endless paper, slowly filling the space.

This is only one part of the work “Post Hoc” by Dane Mitchell, who represents New Zealand this year. The artist in his early forties describes his artwork as one big language object, which is linked to the Palazzina and three other spots in the city. Mitchell has been active as an artist since 1999, and in the past decade he has had more than 30 solo shows. His work is concerned with disappearance, and the rift between objects and memory. It is aptly characterised as intangible.

When we attended the opening party of the pavilion and heard the artist speak about his work, we knew we had to interview him for Unraveled. So, we sat down the following day and let him take us through the preparation process and the setup of his work which is not just an enumeration of things lost, but also speaks about the fleetingness of the world around us.

The artist Kris Lemsalu has been picked to represent the Baltic country. Lemsalu teamed up with a curatorial equipe that consists of the curator Maria Arusoo, the poet Andrew Berardini, the artist Sarah Lucas, her friend and collaborator Tamara Luuk, and the curator and researcher Irene Campolmi. For this podcast Special Venice we talked to Irene over the phone to learn more about the curatorial process. An insider view on the preparation process of the show and the many facets of Kris Lemsalu’s work.

https://www.art-werk.ch/en/podcast/why-do-rituals-and-collective-work-go-together-irene-campolmi-on-kris-lemsalu%27s-estonian-pavilion

During the preview of the 58th Venice art Biennial, Philippe Hindahl and Bernard Vienat interviewed the curator Charlotte Laubard, who invited Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz to exhibit in the Swiss Pavilion. Then we talked to Lorenzo Sandoval, one of the artists of the Finnish pavilion. We discussed their works, their views on collaboration, the national structure of the biennial, and their respective roles as curator and artist.

Artificial Intelligence has become a part of our daily lives. It acts as personal assistant, recommends and selects the content we see on our Facebook or Twitter feeds. We asked the artist Egor Kraft about the relevance of this technology in his work, and about the frame of his speculative research. In the second part of this episode we linked it to a review of the essay AI Aesthetic by Lev Manovich. Artificial Intelligence takes part in the selection of images, for instance through the automatic analysis of pictures. But it is also able to create. Recently, AI generated content has found its way into mainstream productions. Take the series "Game of Thrones"–an algorithm suggested plot ideas, which then have been confirmed or dismissed by the writers of the show. Does that mean that computers learn to be creative? Is there such a thing as an AI aesthetics? Either way, it is only natural that artists take an interest in the possibilities of machines that learn, select, and create.

In the second part of this episode we linked it to a review of the essay AI Aesthetic by Lev Manovich. Artificial Intelligence takes part in the selection of images, for instance through the automatic analysis of pictures. But it is also able to create. Recently, AI generated content has found its way into mainstream productions. Take the series "Game of Thrones"–an algorithm suggested plot ideas, which then have been confirmed or dismissed by the writers of the show. Does that mean that computers learn to be creative? Is there such a thing as an AI aesthetics?