ART-PRESENTATION: Metahaven

Metahaven’s work encompasses the practices of filmmaking, writing, design, and installation, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling, digital superstructures, and propaganda. Their moving image works manifest as immersive installations, and share an aesthetic logic with the collective’s design work in an attention to surface, texture, and the intelligent simplification of complex logics and visual forms. Their work is frequently exhibited and published throughout the world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

The first large-scale museum survey of Metahaven, bringing together the collective’s new moving image work with their design practice. As Metahaven, (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) have achieved international acclaim for their work spanning the genres of visual art, design, and film. This exhibition features the premiere of “Eurasia (Questions on Happiness)” a film installation jointly commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA0. Four galleries at the Stedelijk are dedicated to the large-scale, immersive video installations that Metahaven has been creating since 2015 and that have never been shown before in the Netherlands. A fifth gallery centers around Metahaven’s music videos, textile and print works. Shot in the Ural Mountains and Macedonia, “Eurasia (Questions on Happiness)” combines animation and documentary analysis with aspects of science fiction, poetry, and folk tale. Eurasia begins where its predecessor, Metahaven’s 2015 film “The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)”, left off, and finds itself along the New Silk Road which links the technological infrastructures of Asia and Europe. Traversing through abstract plains and ecological disaster zones, the film focuses on historical time running at different, incompatible rates, across vast territories that are collapsed into singular media spaces. In 2014 Metahaven were commissioned by Lighthouse and The Space, a BBC and Arts Council England not-for-profit service, to make an online documentary that challenged the internet as “a weapon of mass disruption”.  The “The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)”, is the result of this, a multi-channel video installation, feature-length film and episodic online documentary.  Until recently propaganda has been associated with linear narratives taking place in singular media, but with the internet all media has converged and it is here that The Sprawl steps in. “Mostly it is about how propaganda multiplies within that upload/download architecture; an architecture in which both fact and fiction can exist side by side and even overlap” Daniel says.  The film spans the aesthetic and narrative traditions of documentary, art film and music videos, and is particularly inspired by the deepest corners of YouTube which Metaheaven consider to have taken over much of the space formerly occupied by television… steadily invading the space of qualified cinema. The “Sprawl” imagines an exaggerated worldwide social media based on both the internet activism essential to movements such as Wikileaks, Anonymous, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as well as the censored media outlets of contemporary Russia and Ukraine.

Info: Curator: Karen Archey, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 6/10/18-24/2/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl