Artists
Wakil, Mitra & Fabian Hesse
untitled (poisson), 2022
Courtesy: Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, (c) Fabian Hesse & Mitra Wakil, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Foto: Fabian Hesse
Artist duo Mitra Wakil and Fabian Hesse’s collaborative practice focuses on exploring the potential of new technologies to create alternative realities, employing modes of alienation as speculative forms of world-building. Together they work with the materialities of the digital, along with translation processes of analogue and digital media and their interweaving.
While capturing and imaging techniques usually produce body images that smooth out coincidences, fluctuations, irregularities, and discontinuities, the duo’s practice makes productive use of these eventual “scanning errors” to reveal the complex visual and ordering strategies at work in such technologies. The result, as untitled (poisson) shows, are fluid figures based on the moment of the speculative, on the transitional shape of the human to the non-human figure - new forms emerging from flaws in mathematical systematics. Whether larger than life or in miniature, we encounter these post-human sculptures in familiar settings, a scenario that shifts the usual relationship between image and reality. With this comes a questioning of the moment of technical capture and its associated promise of reality and representation, as well as a proposal for new kinds of self-understanding.
Wakil and Hesse provide starting points for an idiosyncratic and self-determined modification; they create collective situations and platforms, also at the intersection between art and mediation, in order to give space to emancipatory perspectives. The duo develops a pleasurable approach to technology as a means of opposing contemporary methods of disciplining the body, for example through data-capturing and numerical control and optimization procedures. The moment of the fragmentary goes hand in hand with the certain recognition of human contours, prompting questions of material and social transformations that are becoming increasingly important in the face of technological change. It paves the way for a reflexive approach to contemporary technologies.
Text: Gloria Aino Grzywatz; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton
Artist duo Mitra Wakil and Fabian Hesse’s collaborative practice focuses on exploring the potential of new technologies to create alternative realities, employing modes of alienation as speculative forms of world-building. Together they work with the materialities of the digital, along with translation processes of analogue and digital media and their interweaving.
While capturing and imaging techniques usually produce body images that smooth out coincidences, fluctuations, irregularities, and discontinuities, the duo’s practice makes productive use of these eventual “scanning errors” to reveal the complex visual and ordering strategies at work in such technologies. The result, as untitled (poisson) shows, are fluid figures based on the moment of the speculative, on the transitional shape of the human to the non-human figure - new forms emerging from flaws in mathematical systematics. Whether larger than life or in miniature, we encounter these post-human sculptures in familiar settings, a scenario that shifts the usual relationship between image and reality. With this comes a questioning of the moment of technical capture and its associated promise of reality and representation, as well as a proposal for new kinds of self-understanding.
Wakil and Hesse provide starting points for an idiosyncratic and self-determined modification; they create collective situations and platforms, also at the intersection between art and mediation, in order to give space to emancipatory perspectives. The duo develops a pleasurable approach to technology as a means of opposing contemporary methods of disciplining the body, for example through data-capturing and numerical control and optimization procedures. The moment of the fragmentary goes hand in hand with the certain recognition of human contours, prompting questions of material and social transformations that are becoming increasingly important in the face of technological change. It paves the way for a reflexive approach to contemporary technologies.
Text: Gloria Aino Grzywatz; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton