Yngve Holen, Anne de Vries
17 June - 21 August 2011
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| © Anne de Vries
Days of Aquarius
Photo: Idan Shilon |
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TruEYE surView
YNGVE HOLEN, ANNE DE VRIES
17 June – 21 August, 2011
TruEYE surView is a duo show presenting new works by two young artists
never exhibited together before - Anne de Vries (NL) and Yngve Holen
(NO). TruEYE surView is curated by Amsterdam-based Estonian artist Katja
Novitskova and is part of her ongoing project Post Internet Survival
Guide.
TruEYE surView is part of a series of exhibitions conceptually related
to the theme of Post Internet Survival Guide, a catalogue-book put
together by myself and published by Revolver Publishing in early 2011.
Through works and online archives of young ‘digital native’ artists, I
attempted to register survival strategies and tools crucial to us today,
trying to re-imagine the very idea of survival and evolution at the
dawn of bio-information technologies.
Instigated by the discussions around Post Internet Survival Guide,
TruEYE surView presents Anne de Vries (NL) and Yngve Holen (NO/DE), two
artists whose work shares a common sensitivity to the merging of matter
and information. Both work with a variety of means, mainly photography,
installation, video and sculpture. As with an exhibition based on a
smart fridge cut in pieces by a waterjet-knife (Holen) or a photograph
of a naked woman with a mobile phone standing on her knees in a
Cartesian coordinate system (de Vries); their practices access our
increasing entanglement with technology, its material and symbolic
origins, its influence on our sense of social reality, its
socio-political implications and its future potentials.
From the mines, energy plants and factories, where the hardware basis of
information technologies comes to being, to brand names, advertising
images, product displays, personal use, and ultimately piles of toxic
waste – commodities undergo a variety of state changes throughout
complex ecological cycles. Considering that what lies at the heart of
every living being is genetic information, we are approaching an uncanny
valley where life and technology co-exist in a blurry commonality of
their informational origin and material essence, each propagating an
agenda of their own. Neolithic agricultural revolution for instance, can
be seen not as an invention – a new human technology – but a state
change, a result of co evolutionary development between humans and
edible grasses. In this process of collaborative deforestation of land
only some benefits were shared by humans. If we can look at the spread
of Internet of Things as equivalent to the Neolithic agrarian
revolution, then what is information technologies relationship with us
as species? What does it take for a commodity to live, and what are the
ecological principles of art?
Curating this exhibition is a next step in approaching a
'neo-materialistic' understanding of contemporary art as a domain of
heightened density of value flows, and information technologies as an
expanding ecology. In TruEYE surView Anne de Vries and Yngve Holen are
merging these domains in fluid assemblages, proposing visionary
semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of
today’s digital data driven society.
— Katja Novitskova, artist and designer
Yngve Holen (NO, b. 1982)
lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule
für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main. Recent solo
exhibitions include Parasagittal Brain, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö,
Half Asleep to the 2010 Hot One Thousand and One, Neue Alte Brücke,
Frankfurt am Main, Paloma Presents, Zürich and Landings Projectspace,
Vestfosse, Norway. Selected group exhibitions include Approximately
Infinite Universe, New Jerseyy, Basel (2008). He recently co-curated the
exhibition The Smart Frrridge, is also co-initiator of the web-based
publisher XYM and co-organizer of the club BODY XEROX. <http://www.johanberggren.com/holen-001.html>
Anne de Vries (NL, b. 1977)
works and lives between Amsterdam and Berlin. His work has been shown
frequently in a wide range of museums, artist spaces, galleries, online
and printed publications, including Rhizome (NYC), Gentili Apri
(Berlin), Foam (Amsterdam), Preteen (Mexico City), The Future Gallery
(Berlin), W139 (Amsterdam), Grimm Museum (Berlin), Watou (Belgium),
Darsa Comfort (Zurich), Hyeres (France) and The Armory (New York). De
Vries graduated from Rietveld Academie and is currently a resident at
the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. <http://www.annedevries.info/>
Katja Novitskova (EST/NL, b. 1984)
is an artist, curator and graphic designer born in Estonia, living and
working in Amsterdam. Novitskova’s artistic and curatorial work has been
exhibited and distributed in places like the Future Gallery /
Transmediale in Berlin, Mediamatic, NIMK and W139 in Amsterdam, New
Capital in Chicago, Woodmill in London; with upcoming shows at New
Gallery in London, Xpace in Toronto and B Galleria in Turku among
others. <http://katjanovi.net/>
www.w139.nl
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