Flagship show

Born in 1977 in Geneva. Lives and works between Geneva and Berlin.

oxymoron

This gray ash cube is the result of a patient work during which the artist sieves and compresses residues of burnt photographs. The sculpture, seemingly massive and solid, is in fact extremely fragile and volatile - and therefore assumes an oxymoron. It disintegrates according to the air currents and the movements of the spectators around it. The gray monochrome is also presented as a stele synthesizing the motley flow of images which vainly assail our daily glances, as if too many images ended up killing the image. And reminds us, like a memento mori, that everything turns to dust ...

Born in 1971 in Paris. Lives and works in Paris and Montreal.

Recursive neural networks, usually referred to as AI, allow media to mutate. From huge databases accumulated on the Web, it is possible to produce resembling images: we provide a neural network with thousands of images of birds and new images appear that we recognize as birds even if these do not exist.

These are media media that constitute a real break in the history of the production of realism. MUE invites us to the permanent metamorphosis of images taken in the permanent flux of mutation. An alternate world becomes visible that looks like the one we know but differs from it, like the possibility of an unexplored branch. These are realistic images, but they are no longer real. They are no longer based on the capture of light (photorealism) but on the synthesis of memories captured in the nets of massive data network.

What happens to the image when it is taken in an infinite series? What is its form when it is only the form of its change? What era of realism do we enter when we recognize as realistic images that do not come from the capture of reality but from the hypermnesia of the network?

Born in 1977 in Lüneburg. Born in 1976 in Solingen (Germany). Live and work in Hamburg.

This installation consists of two parts: a print cut by a document shredder and a radio broadcasting a sound collage. The images come from the archives of the Ministry of National Security of the Democratic Republic of Germany, whose intelligence services used these visuals to train their agents to encrypt messages in a coded sign system.

The sound collage is made up of archives of shortwave radio stations, used to carry military messages and intelligence around the world. A transmitter hidden in the exhibition space, which functions as a mini radio station, sends the sound signal to all the VHF receivers in the vicinity.

Antje Feger and Benjamin Stumpf remind us of what surveillance and intelligence techniques were like during the Cold War, before the advent of digital technology.

Born in Straubing (Germany). Lives and works in Berlin

Clemens Gritl designs artificial 3D computer models inspired by 1960th century urban utopias. These cold black and white architectures, with brutalist concrete edges, are surrounded by an endless motorway network, and bathe in a dark atmosphere saturated with asphalt. They therefore refer to the revolutionary social visions of the XNUMXs, while painting a disturbing dystopian picture of their future. Their homogeneous structures, with repetitive shapes and gigantic dimensions, build cities that are at once aggressive, nightmarish… and fascinating. But what impact can they have on humanity and their inhabitants? Do they not above all denote a desire to organize society and space, to the point of oppressing them? Indeed, we can fear that such a city will see itself destined to develop an ultra-functional society ... Or, on the contrary, to tip our lives into a threatening and alienating social dysfunction.

Born in 1970 in Mainz. Lives and works in Cologne and Berlin.
Represented by Galerie Barbara Gross (Berlin), Produzentengalerie (Hamburg), and Sonnabend Gallery (New York).

Born in 1979 in Bregenz (Austria). Lives and works in Vienna.
Represented by the 22,48 m2 gallery (Paris).

Claudia Larcher is a visual artist specializing in video animation, collage, photography and installation. Series Urban Landscapes uses architectural magazines or periodicals, the pages of which are worked with a scalpel. The blocks of text are removed, and only elements of printed buildings remain. The different layers therefore form a relief: at the opening of each double page, a three-dimensional architectural landscape is revealed.

Video in-game advertising ornament is a crime, behind its squeaky title which reopens the debate on the usefulness or not of art in our everyday life, presents a scenario of this same type of work compiling different kinds of architectural visuals.

The series Man refers to the work of designer Mies Van der Rohe, former director of the Bauhaus, through photographic views of buildings, details of interior volumes, and façade grid structures, which are superimposed and intertwined thanks to a assembly game. These delicate fragments appear to have been removed from their context with the original scalpel in order to be repackaged. They tell the story of the modernist dream of an architecture made of efficiency, transparency and elegance.

Born in 1995 in Brussels. Lives and works in Paris and Rennes.
Graduated from the EMI-CFD School of Journalism in Paris.

"2091 - The Ministry of Privacy" reveals facial recognition mechanisms used by the Chinese government to monitor and oppress ethnic minorities, including Uighur and Kazakh, in the Xinjiang region. I produced this series in collaboration with William Attache, an artificial intelligence engineer, to create facial recognition software similar to those used by the Chinese government. Then I went to Kashgar, one of the last strongholds of Uighur and Kazakh culture, and one of the most closely guarded towns in the territory, to photograph the daily life of these populations.

Despite government censorship, I was able to send my photographs to facial recognition programs previously developed on my computer. The software then proceeded to recognize the inhabitants appearing in the photos, and exported their biometric information on their face. Depending on the technology, some are displayed as red dots (called Landmarks) others using the Delaunay diagram - an alternative used to map such information. My work thus underlines the intrusive nature of these technologies, until then invisible, and the threat they represent for the inhabitants.

Born in 1964 in Aix-la-Chapelle. Lives and works in Cologne and Zurich.
Represented by the Judith Andreae gallery (Bonn).

Achim Mohné relies on new digital media and new technologies to try to understand how our perception and our awareness of physical and social space are rethinking. Digital immateriality and virtual corporeality constitute the two research subjects of the series 3D-Google-Earth-Model, started in 2018. These 3D works deal with the relationship between real urban space and its virtual representations, called “avatars”. These retain an illustrative and referential character while switching to a strange, even abstract, digital aesthetic resulting from the recording and translation of the Earth's surface by satellites and drones.

This series of printed sculptures explore methods of 3D display of virtual globes (software that models the Earth in 3D, the first of its kind was Google Earth), which "aesthetically prepare users for future media, such as Virtual Reality or Artificial Reality or Mixed Realities ”, according to art historian Pamela C. Scorzin.

Project created especially for the Tangible Image Biennial 2021 :
Mozilla hub: https://hubs.mozilla.com/ZWMyYWC/atelier-basfroi

Born in 1980 in Kilkenny (Ireland). Lives and works in New York.
Represented by the Carlier Gebauer gallery (Berlin, Madrid).

The series Infra is marked by Mosse's use of Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued infrared reconnaissance film. The film records chlorophyll in living vegetation. The result is the lush Congolese rainforest rendered in a beautifully surreal landscape of pinks and reds. Mosse said in an interview with British Journal of Photography : “I wanted to export this technology to a more difficult situation, to end the generic conventions of calcified mass media narratives, and to question how we are allowed to represent this forgotten conflict. I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively to question the modes of construction of war photography. "

Heat Maps, 2017.
Thermal camera in refugee camps (Greece, Germany, Bulgaria, Germany)

This series of photos traces the lives of migrants in different camps around the world. To report on their living conditions, the photographer armed himself with a military weapon, a thermal camera capable of filming several kilometers away.

“This very powerful and in my opinion very disturbing camera technology, I see it as an allegory of the military-humanitarian complex which characterizes the only response of the European Union to the influx of migrants, the 'refugee crisis' as one called her. This is the only solution we have apparently found to welcome asylum seekers, refugees who land on our shores. "(Richard Mosse, interview in France Culture).

Born in 1966 in Munich. Lives and works in Berlin.
Represented by the Esther Schipper gallery (Berlin).

Through this short video loop, Hito Steyerl hits a black LCD screen with a wood chisel and cuts through its surface, under the effect of shock, a network of multicolored cracks. The word STRIKE, which frames this minimal performance and means "to strike something" or "to go on strike", therefore implies an act of collision, disturbance, protest or resistance. It can be read either as an imperative that encourages us to join the artist in his action. It is therefore akin to a protest movement against the power of screens. Or like an iconoclastic gesture revealing the mode of production, appearance and diffusion of images. By breaking this screen, Steyerl therefore updates the material and technological infrastructures, as well as their political and ideological implications, which underlie all representational content ... And underlines that the screen does indeed determine what remains visible or invisible to society, to our minds and to our eyes.

Born in 1960 in France.

Hypogeum

These architectures have always seemed to me to be hieratic and timeless places open to fiction and the human sciences in which geography and history could be presented as utopias. Their archetypal forms allow us to reconstruct time and space according to our own desire and to superimpose on the photographic reality the equivalence of an interior landscape.

Babylon

The last open-air excavations on the archaeological site of Babylon would have shown that the library of the mythical city would in no way be a model of rational classification of catalogs and written tablets of a vanished civilization. The architecture of the place actually draws an initiatory journey through the mazes of rooms and stairs. The library thus obeys a ritual (and not memorial) function: that of a spiritual journey where the reader is above all a believer who prays aloud and follows a procession.

Born in 1982. Lives and works in Brussels.
Represented by the Harlan Levey Project gallery (Brussels).

VideoSculpture XXI (Vegas)

Using the video screen as a sculptural material, Emmanuel Van Der Auwera cuts out the filters that make up each LCD screen and places them on a tripod. In doing so, the images become visible in the form of fragments, depending on the viewer's position, and are discovered from several points of view. Captured by thermographic cameras used in the army or in surveillance devices, this sequence paints a fantastical portrait of the “Strip” of Las Vegas. Passers-by on the avenue clad with signs appear as unwilling filmed subjects, seen through the eye of a sniper.