Interview with AES + F

AES+F Installation view, Turandot 2070, Jeonnam Museum of Art, 2021 Photo Jung Me Chai ©월간미술 Wolganmisool monthly art magazine/ Aug 2021   Interview with AES+F Jung Me Chai    You are working as the collective AES+F in Moscow and Berlin. How do you manage to work together? Where and how does the process begin for you? We are organized similarly as a film production company, with similar roles but with no hierarchy. Each project comes out of an idea which is born out of a chaotic discussion among ourselves when we are in the field of some problems. We don’t have a specific method – we live in a constant and chaotic process of birthing ideas. All the ideas, in turn, are influenced mainly by the media stream. How did your practice change over the years? We belong to a generation that is witness to and responsible for the most recent technological revolution. Our practice evolved along with technology, beginning with painting and installation and going through all the various new media. Much of the different lives in your works seem based on ambiguity and artificiality. So how does it work together? We live in a time of artificial constructs and false ideologies. It is the idiosyncrasy of our time – the coexistence of contradictory, ambiguous, and synthetic beliefs. We believe that contemporary art cannot be called contemporary if it doesn’t in some way reflects this paradigm. Compositing portraits in (non)existent fantasy backgrounds and circumstances is exceptionally provocative and offensive. For instance, Islamic Project in 1996 and many other works. Why? We often use the grotesque, like in psychoanalysis. The intention is not to be offensive but to reflect the viewer’s own fears and prejudices back to her or him in order to allow them to overcome them, usually with humour and irony. Mythology, hyperrealism and historicism meet in various levels of an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world. Is that AES+F’s leading visual and narrative conventions, or something else? We do like to work at the intersection of archetypal mythology, historicism, and contemporary reality, but we don’t reflect on the apocalypse that often. It is more about utopia and dystopic futures than about a specific event, although the apocalypse is certainly a potentiality in any future. Although we aren’t futurists in a traditional sense, in that, we don’t try to imagine a utopic future that is radically different from the present; instead, we look deeply into the present to find different futures.  Your recent production, Turandot 2070, was first a collaborative opera work performed at Teatro Massimo in Italy. Can you please tell us about the concept of Turandot 2070? Would this piece work in a non-opera setup such as an exhibition? The video set wasn’t conceived as an illustration of the opera’s libretto. We sublimate the text in order to create a surrealistic parallel – a stand-alone artwork. To further differentiate the set from the video installation, we asked a composer, Vladimir Rannev, to reinterpret the original composition in a similar way. In this way, the work considers the contemporary problems of China’s threat to the West, female revenge, and authoritarian use of technology through the prism of Turandot’s story. “Allegoria Sacra” takes everything in an airport, but the “Allegoria Sacra-Airport ” does not seem to work as the usual notion of an airport. It is almost like one of my nightmares. Is it a tech version of Purgatory? The airport is our metaphor for Purgatory. Representatives of all mythologies and cultures find themselves in one transitory place and interact with one another – it’s an allegory of the contemporary world. If you follow the narrative closely, you see that they all go to sleep one after another and meet in each other’s dreams. In the contemporary world, where everything exists side-by-side simultaneously in flattening virtuality, the reality is very similar to a dream or a nightmare, isn’t it? In a dream, you would also often find things which have no connection to one another coexisting without seeming out of place. It took me some time to figure out that your video works are animated photography. Are reasons not to use conventional cinematic techniques? To achieve the feeling of alienation. This technique gives us a very unnatural sharpness and aberrant motion, which gives that effect. It is almost like puppetry or digital choreography. Actors or models in your works have physically stunning bodies and beautiful appearances no matter their ages, gender, and races; they almost look like robots or humanoids. Why? You’re right, except we are not interested in models that are beautiful per se, but in those that represent certain social modalities. All the characters are simultaneously alienated from one another and hyper-performative. The idea is to strip them of personality and have them embody a social role or perform an artificial behaviour, quite like robots, as you pointed out.   All state of animal-human-animal chimaeras exists in “Inverso Mundus”. Is Transformation a keyword, or what is the conceptual thought behind this? Chimeras represent unrealized or impossible, even contradictory, ideas. It is a metaphor for contemporary multi-identity, when people carry within themselves various and often times contrary ideas.  What makes something art? Most people look but do not see. Art is what allows them to see whatever it is that they usually don’t. What comes next? We are thinking about a new big project in our favourite way – combining mythology with hyper-contemporaneity.  

Interview with Johann König

Johann König Photo Marco Fischer ©월간미술 Wolganmisool monthly art magazine/ Aug 2022 Interview with Johann König  Jung Me Chai What are the main differences between making crypto art exhibitions to classical ones with tangible artworks? So actually, they’re not so many differences because you need to produce the work. You need to hang it and install it. So it’s actually quite similar when thinking of doing a show here at the gallery or DeCentral, and although the digital possibilities of cause a much broader and antenna limitations to what is possible. For example, if there’s no gravity.   The gallery held the first NFT auction on the OpenSea as part of the group exhibition THE ARTIST IS ONLINE last year and presented DIGITAL PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES IN A VIRTUAL WORLD at Decentraland. What brought you to do this step? So the motivation then was really to enter the Metaverse and understand the mechanics. I think you can only learn and understand how this works if you do it, and the biggest learning was that It’s still very divided between crypto and non-crypto. That’s why we developed a solution, we are selling NFTs on our website at König Gallery.com. He can also pay with a credit card and PayPal when interested in people. And so our aim is always to widen the art world and make more people join and this for we wanted to build this bridge between crypto and via payments, which we achieved. And just recently, launched Alicja Kwade DNA minted on Ethereum blockchain.   The show with the NFT artist Refik Anadol was impressive inside and outside KÖNiG GALERIE. What triggered you to make this exhibition, and what was the critical issue for making this show? In terms of Refik Anadol and the gallery program, we try always to show the most relevant artists in their respective fields. So we show Katharina Grosse see as an abstract painter. We have looked into the digital art field and tried to understand who the most important figures are for quite some time ago. And then I discovered Refik Anadol. I started a conversation with him quite some time ago and was happy enough to convince him to join the gallery. Now we represent him and join him on his journey.   Making a crypto art exhibition is not just the congestion of digital artworks, virtual spacetime, technology, and artists. What is your perception of crypto art? Exactly. Good question. I think that crypto art means digital art, and I think it’s very important.  As I said before, we try to bridge both spaces and bring the digital artist into the facility’s physical world and the physical artist into the digital. So that’s why we are extremely proud of the project. We did it with Alicja Kwade. Kwade, the artist, printed her entire genome on 259.025 A4 sheets of paper. Whilst 99.9% of all human DNA is identical, Kwade highlighted her individual and unique profile in bold text. With approximately12,000 sheets. Now, you can acquire her DNA in pieces. Each NFT represents 25 pages.   Will you keep showing the crypto art and metaverse related presentations? We will keep showing crypto art, but it’s not our focus. So we try it as a gallery to provide space, that space exists in the podcast in the Decentraland in different galleries in art world presentation, and crypto is one part of it, but not the main part. But to make the space and the platform more accessible to more artists, we found MISA.ART., which is a separate entity from König Gallery. This leads to your next question.   Buying art online will be more expected that collectors are almost grown up with digital artworks and are familiar with the media? Exactly. That’s why we are offering works on the website of  KÖNiG GALERIE  and have a quite complex system where more relevant collectors see more inventory than general ones. And then we founded MISA.ART is a marketplace for physical and digital art.   You /KÖNiG GALERIE run three podcasts, WAS MIT KUNST, KÖNIG KUNST and KUNST CRIME. Why podcasts? So I grew up in an artist household and was surrounded by art from day one. And for me, it’s very important to make the artwork more inclusive and easier to access. And I think this goes by education and learning. So that’s why Investment Kunst we talk about art quite casually, so then there’s a voice from the off coming and explaining the context. Because I think it’s also important to understand that artists are people like all of us. Sometimes it’s a more coincidence how they became who they are today. In terms of KUNST CRIME, I think it’s interesting to speak about the insides of the art market because they are usually more known to a broader audience. And that’s a great opportunity also with the blockchain because it’s more transparent, you know, there can be less forgery. I would say a highlight of KUNST CRIME. Let me think.   As far as I am informed, KUNST CRIME highlights crimes from the world of art. Are there episodes that you want to introduce?  One of the highlights of KUNST CRIME is when I talk to Helge Achenbach, who is an art adviser who spent time in jail for screwing clients and for commissions, and this is also something the blockchain would pretend from happening.   Which exhibition was most challenging for you as a gallerist, and why? Definitely, Refik Anadol was one of the most challenging exhibitions. Because of the masses of people who came in. We had to orchestrate this amount of people. And so everybody had a good experience, and still, they could see the show and time.   The COVID-19 outbreak has a growing impact on almost everything. Do we need to rethink the paradigms for art exhibitions? I definitely think that COVID-19 changed everything and made many things possible. For example, for us, we have found MISA.ART. I also think that we will rethink art fairs. We also learned how lucky we are with our spaces. Because they’re very unique and special and provide a unique experience, I think the experience is an addition to digital Innovation and will be very much needed because that’s something you can replace.   Could you tell us a bit about your plans?  I mean, I really look forward to travelling to Korea because I haven’t been there for so long. To attend the Fries Art fair. And I would say that’s like, on top of my looking forward plans and let me know if you could listen to everything and if my answers are sufficient too, thank you. Bye.  

Interview with Yilmaz Dziewior 

Yilmaz_Dziewior Photo Albrecht Fuchs ©월간미술 Wolganmisool monthly art magazine/ July 2020 SPOT-ON: An Interview with Yilmaz Dziewior ahead of the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 Jung Me Chai  Since 2015 you’ve been the director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. What do you find most challenging about being the director of the Museum Ludwig? The biggest challenge is to find the right balance in sharing one’s limited time between the different public I am here to work with. In the last years I spend much more time with politicians and sponsors for example than with artists. So one of my New Year’s resolution was to do  more studio visits, which I started more frequently since January this year but was stopped a bit through Corona the last two months.   You have been appointed a curator of this important event. How much did your curatorial practice changed over the years? Over the years, I became even more conscious about the topics I am really interested in.  Since the beginning of my curatorial practise, I was interested in the idea of cultural identity and what it means to come from a certain place and how people judge other people because of their origins. I guess this also is because I have a Turkish first Name and Polish family name, but only grew up in Germany and have no deep roots in the origins of my parents.   Curating is not just creating connections between artworks, spacetime, people, and it’s con-texts. The role of the curator is continuously in development. According to you, what would be the definition or role of the curator for you? There are many definitions of the role of the curator. For me, it is important to reach an audience which not necessary is interested in art. I myself come from a background where culture in general did not matter at all during my childhood. But encounting art through visiting museums with my school, I realized how important art and culture is for one’s own development. This opportunity I would like our institution to provide for others as well.   Which exhibition was most challenging for you as a curator, and why? In 1999, I was a co-curator for the exhibition „Art-Worlds in Dialogue. From Gauguin to the global present“ at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. As the title implies this exhibition was about the cultural exchange in 20th Century art, and it was my first very intense confrontation with this topic which i still up to now very important for my curatorial work.   How do you feel about being chosen to curate the German Pavilion in 2021 after the Austrian Pavilion in 2015? It doesn’t often happen that a curator has been appointed curator twice for Venice. I feel very honored and challenged to be invited to curate the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Already in 2015 I had the pleasure to curate the Austrian pavilion, so I have already some experience with the situation and this for sure will help me to realize this project more easily.   There’s have been arousing critics about the system “national pavilion “concept in Biennale. Do we still need this glorifying “national pavilion concept “? I guess it is less about “glorifying” the national concept and more about critical questioning the meaning of national and cultural belonging. For this critical discourse, the national pavilions in Venice a very good context.   How does curation works within a museum context compare to Venice Biennale? Both fields have more differences than they have in common. For the museum, you think in much longer terms and need much more time in advance to plan an exhibition. For Venice, very often you have only a bit more than one year as a curator for a national pavilion. For me one key aspect of the museum is its collection and all of our program at the Museum Ludwig in some way or the other relates to the collection of our museum. In Venice, it is more about the work you develop and expose and how this makes sense in the context, which for the German pavilion is much determined by its architecture, history and current political and social situation we live in.   The COVID-19 outbreak has a growing impact on almost everything. Do we need to rethink the paradigms for art exhibitions? Especially the most important contemporary art event in the world like Venice Biennale? I think after this epidemic, people will change their attitude towards the paradigms for art exhibitions. On the one hand, we all experienced that the digital is very relevant and that people have access to art is a way not to lose contact. There is also a social component to this because you have to have the resource’s for the equipment, and you have to the time to spent on the internet. At the same time, we experience how important it is to see art in the flesh, to stand in front of a painting or walk through an installation. In the future, a lot of people will think twice when they have to meet someone and if it is really necessary to take a train or airplane or if a videoconference will be the better solution.   Can this pandemic effect on your curatorial process? Yes, but I do not know exactly yet the precise effect’s Through the crisis and the ban on direct contact associated with it, I once again became aware how important direct contact with people is. You cannot substitute a real meeting with a digital encounter. Many nuances are lost in video conferences, and often these meetings are too goal-oriented, leaving little room for the unforeseen. I assume that the contribution in the German Pavilion will deal with the question of what it means to exhibit in 2020 at this location. The national pavilion is determined by a specific architecture and a history that is not always without problems.    A title