PRESENTATION: Contact Zones
The exhibition “Contact Zones – Pamela Breda, Victoria Keddie, Sajan Mani” is the second collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) and the Museum Angewandte Kunst. The initiative for this joint exhibition came from INHABIT, the Institute’s artist-in-residence program, which hosts two guest artists from different artistic disciplines each year for four months to pursue their work in dialogue and exchange with the researchers.
By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Museum Angewandte Kunst Archive
The title “CONTACT ZONES” alludes to the interaction between different cultures of knowledge and the challenge of not only fostering a conversation between the arts and natural sciences, but also creating a common language and opportunities for dialogue. While in cultural studies, the term “contact zone” describes a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, in the context of this residency program it refers to the space of interaction between the artistic and scientific fields. Without conceptual constraints, each iteration of INHABIT is entirely defined by the respective guest artists themselves in terms of the questions posed and the media employed. Pamela Breda’s practice as an artist and filmmaker navigates between experimental film, photography, constructed objects, and installations. She is particularly interested in exploring the connections between science and socio-cultural frameworks through the impact of digital technologies on individual and collective identities. The emphasis of her work is on the examination of virtual realities and artificial intelligence as well as the ethical, political, and psychological challenges and questions arising from the technological paradigm shift.In her film, the artist sketches a future scenario in which advanced artificial intelligence blurs the boundaries between human and machine actors, and poetically introduces us to the challenges of human relationships and interactions with AI systems. Victoria Keddie is an artist working across disciplines in sound, video, instal lation, and performance. Her work emphasizes the untold stories hidden within seemingly ordinary artifacts and spaces, illustrating their significant role in shaping our collective narrative. Keddie’s projects are characterized by the linking of disclosure and decoding of technological infrastructures — e.g., radio and television transmissions — with storytelling in order to enable different narratives of media, their apparatuses, and their conditions that expand a unified history of technology. The examination of acoustic phenomena and language is a recurring theme in her artistic work. Keddie’s current project navigates the cacophony of media ecologies, embracing the acoustic complexity of language and dialects. She focuses on the ongoing transformation of spoken language, exploring the auditory and rhythmic nuances of phonetic expression in a multimedia and expansive installation. Sajan Mani is an intersectional artist who comes from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Kerala, South India. His artistic work expresses the concerns and issues of India’s marginalized and oppressed social groups through various media, materials, and practices. Often his black Dalit body is the instrument to express the brutality of Dalit history and its continuity. His ongoing research project Wake-Up Calls for My Ancestors engages with Western archival practices by critically examinating collections of South Indian photographs to redefine the narratives and representations of these marginalized voices and to challenge the traditional power structures in Western archives. Sajan Mani works along his biography of Dalit history and the colonial history of Kerala, creating an alternative narrative based on colonial collections that counters the muteness and oppression of his ancestors with a different visibility. All the artists have worked in very different ways during their residencies, and their projects are an expression of different approaches to the scientific environment and, not least, shaped by encounters, dialogues, and cooperation.
Participating Artists: Pamela Breda, Victoria Keddie, and Sajan Mani
Photo: Pamela Breda, Marked by Intensity, 2024, film still, © Pamela Breda
Info: Curator: Eike Walkenhorst, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Schaumainkai 17, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Duration: 17/5-28/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.museumangewandtekunst.de/
