Exhibition for the CIVA Festival 2023
Belvedere21, Vienna & online
with works by: Angela Washko, Josèfa Ntjam, Kumbirai Makumbe, Morehshin Allahyari, Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg, Stefanie Moshammer, Tina Kult
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
exhibition design: Maria Rudakova
2023
Cyberspace has triggered a cultural shift that enables a new understanding of body, identity, and mind. Through the virtual, we are able to create new forms of intimacy, relationships, and kinship, and enable a greater diversity of identities. However, it also propagates coded prejudices and disembodied violence that nevertheless become very tangible through the phygital nature of our reality. Curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon, the exhibition Intangible Care explores tactics of care as artistic practice. It unfolds a collection of seven international positions that address the intangibility of our contemporary phygital world and develop strategies of resilience. Through video and immersive and interactive installations, Intangible Care plays with both tangible and intangible concepts, activating an urgent dialogue and exploration of care and affect in our contemporary and technological society.
Exhibition for the CIVA Festival 2022
Belvedere21, Vienna & online
with works by: Yein Lee, Rebecca Merlic, Cristian Anutoiu, Legacy Russell, Laokoon, Depart, Keiken
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
exhibition design: Maria Rudakova
2022
The exhibition “Embodied Structures” deals with the concept of the body and its current role in sociopolitical and cultural discourses. Through seven international positions, it proposes a story of glitch, non-binary and prosthetic bodies, avatars, cyborgs, and data bodies, and talks about our willingness to exhibit ourselves online and to even assign concrete values to our data alter egos and how the awareness of our body changes through the phygital. It rejects binary structures and instead establishes concepts of gender fluidity or the post-Anthropocene where the body can be a vehicle for new world building and collective consciousness.
Symposion Lindabrunn, online
with works by: Keiken + George Jasper Stone, Kumbirai Makumbe, Theo Triantafyllidis, The (new) Constellation, Line F. Jensen, Brooklyn J. Phakathi, Maximilian Prag + Marlene Kager + Maris Nisu + Pauline Jocher, Christiane Peschek, Stefano D’Alessio, Ernst Lima, Alexander Martinz
curated by Martina Menegon
2021
Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s concept of Metaverse as a virtual world that can be accessed through public or private terminals located in the physical reality (“Snow Crash”, 1992), the festival “Uncanny Reality” downloads various formats into the offline nature of Lindabrunn and reflects on the Virtual as a space that coexists interdependently with our AFK (Away From Keyboard) Reality.
Through an exhibition, digital interventions and a series of live events, the festival looks at the Virtual as an artistic medium and form of expression, exploring the synthetic yet perceivable nature and corporeality of virtual spaces and bodies and reflecting on the sense of “intellectual uncertainty” and uncanniness provoked by subversive uses of technology in Art.
Exhibition for the CIVA Festival 2021
online, various locations
with works by: Christiane Peschek, Emanuel Gollob, Catherine Spe, Brooklyn J. Pakathi, enorê, LaJuné McMillian, Format (*.strk), Memo Akten, Shira Shvadron, Some Place Studio, Zalán Szakács, Jonas Bohatsch, Andreas Palfinger & Cristian Anutoiu, Dominik Einfalt, Margarete Jahrmann & Thomas Wagensommerer, Morehshin Allahyari, Hannelore Jarvis Essandoh & Willhelm Scherübl, Cassie McQuater, Erika Glionna & Stefano Cerelli & Peter Varnai, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
a collaboration between sound:framer and Vienna Business Agency / Creative Days Vienna
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
2021
“Expanded Realities and Networked Voices” explores the consequences of virtuality and even looks beyond our digital screens. The exhibition serves as a place to experience virtual art in its native environment while also being a vehicle to learn and understand our analogue world and global society AFK (away from keyboard). Five chapters contextualize the work of nineteen international digital artists. The virtual exhibition “Expanded Realities and Networked Voices” reflects on the relationship between ourselves and contemporary new media. The online show focuses on virtual art that challenges the medium and pushes the limits of technology while critically reflecting on the power and the impact that digital tools have on our society. In times of mass use of social media, online tools and the corporations behind them gain unprecedented power but so can our voices and our online actions. By taking hold of space and occupying the Metaverse, our voices interconnect, intersect, and become a network.
virtual spaces designed by Maximilian Prag, Enrico Zago, Martina Menegon
online exhibition (Mozilla Hubs)
with works by: Format (*.strk), Some Place Studio, Andreas Palfinger & Cristian Anutoiu, Dominik Einfalt, Hannelore Jarvis Essandoh & Willhelm Scherübl, Erika Glionna & Stefano Cerelli & Peter Varnai
a collaboration between sound:framer and Vienna Business Agency / Creative Days Vienna
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
2021 - 2024
The Vienna Business Agency – in cooperation with sound:frame – were looking for dramaturgical, functional and narrative spatial concepts for virtual environments focusing on topics like social interaction, artistic production and knowledge exchange. A jury consisting of representatives of the Vienna Business Agency and sound:frame and the guest jurors Wade Wallerstein (Silicon Valet / TRANSFER Gallery) and Martina Menegon (artist / lecturer) selected the best six projects out of 21 submissions. The exhibition is a showcase of the finalists and winners of the price.
main virtual space designed by Enrico Zago, Martina Menegon
online platform
a collaboration between sound:framer and Vienna Business Agency
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
2021 - 2024
The sound:frame metaverse is an online exhibition space as well as a connective platform for all the virtual exhibitions curated and created by sound:frame. Every space goes beyond the function of a virtual exhibition, extending into meetup or meditative spaces.
online exhibition (Mozilla Hubs)
with works by: Claire Hentshker, Malitzin Cortes, Ayo Aloba, Virgil Widrich & Martin Reinhardt, Maximilian Prag & Marlene Kager, Daryna Fez, Diana Andrei, Dominik Einfalt, MONOCOLOR
a collaboration between sound:framer and Vienna Design Week
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
2020 - 2024
Under the title “Experiencing extended realities”, Area for Virtual Art presented the works of nine (inter)national artists who deal with the virtual as a new space of possibilities for their art. Most of the virtual artworks were created site-specific or adapted for our virtual space. “Experiencing Extended Realities” sees the digital as a laboratory in which we can make new experiences and experiment with our ideas of reality. The artistic and playful approach to the virtual space and to ourselves as avatars poses a challenge to our self-image and to our own construction of identity.
main virtual space designed by Enrico Zago, Martina Menegon
online exhibition space (Mozilla Hubs)
a collaboration between sound:framer and Pausanio
curated by Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon
2020 - 2024
The Area for Virtual Art is an online platform for digital art and virtual formats. A virtual space to discover current artistic approaches in virtual exhibitions and meet people in discussion programs and live events to exchange thoughts and create new ideas and concepts. The Area for Virtual Art develops into an international hub, giving a platform to current digital art forms and connecting people all over the world. Since its start, the Area for Virtual Art hosts exhibitions, discourse formats and social events and presents current digital artistic approaches, such as XR, interactive or AI based (art)works. Amidst the chaos of cyberspace and offline reality, the Area for Virtual Art creates a setting for people to show, see and experience digital art, gain new insights, critically reflect and create connections.
main virtual space and avatars design: Enrico Zago, Maximilian Prag, Martina Menegon
Old Habits
with works by: Line F. Jensen
curated by /afk (Martina Menegon and Shahab Nedaei)
@ suzieshride, Vienna
2019
The exhibition OLD HABITS invites us to discover a parallel reality presented via a series of simulations that explore the dynamics of human interconnections in the context of family, neighbourhood and workplace.
Line Finderup Jensen autobiographical approach shifts from a personal to a collective experience of narrative throughout her selected works. Using the Virtual as an artistic medium and form of expression, Jensen embraces digital artefacts and imperfections that arise during the creational and computational process and use these ‘digital misrepresentations’ to underline the grotesque of the ordinary.
Poetics of Uncertainty
with works by: Claire Hentshker
curated by /afk (Martina Menegon and Shahab Nedaei)
@ suzieshride, Vienna
2019
Mapping the gaze of lost memories. with photogrammetry and immersive technology Defining reality in the age of Post-Truth is a delicate and fragile matter. Over the last decade we grew in distrust of already established facts and images, as Computer Generated Images (CGI) conquered Photo-Realism and algorithms started to filter our everyday reality. Revisiting the past can mediate our experience of the present while shaping our perception and understanding of an uncertain reality. As anything can be simulated, reality becomes precarious.
“[...] emerging technologies can be used to capture the abstract, the confusing, the hidden, the complicated" (Claire Hentschker) Curated by /afk: Martina Menegon and Shahab Nedaei, “Poetics of Uncertainty” features selected artworks by Claire Hentschker that explore the use of photogrammetry and immersive technology to create memories of places that no longer exists. Distancing her work from photorealism, Hentschker embraces CGI imperfections to capture and synthesize the memories, realities and pasts of lost places, creating new, bizarre and abstract shapes of these locations. Every artwork becomes a virtual archive of broken polygons that feel almost real but not quite. They are fragments of a broken existence, a disconnected new memory dictated by computer-vision and experimental imaging technologies.