MoMAR

Group show:
 Augmented Species

September 10 2021 - January 15 2022

Opening Reception:
Friday September 10th, 3pm - 5:30pm
(Ground-floor, The Sculpture Garden)

AUGMENTED SPECIES
Invasive Sculptures in Hybrid Ecologies

ARTISTS:

Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick
Carla Gannis
Joanna Hoffmann
Tamiko Thiel

Curated by Tina Sauerlaender and Ursula Ströbele

Organized and developed by MoMAR (Damjanski, David Lobser, Monique Baltzer, Vicky Leung)

An International Touring Exhibition of AR-Sculpture in Museums and Sculptural Gardens

The relationship between the arts, and what has been called ‘nature‘ as a historic, cultural and scientific concept, has undergone some major shifts. Various theories of post-(human)nature and eco-fiction have become more and more influential during the last decades as is well-known. The term ‘nature‘ itself has been called into question. Ecological theorists, such as Timothy Morton think that we actually live in a post-natural age, proclaiming ecology without nature. Donna Haraway describes entangled multispecies histories, using the term natureculture. These theories include new ways of thinking about established hierarchies, agency and power, as well as difference and ontology.

Leaving behind established dualisms, the exhibition Augmented Species. Invasive Sculptures in Hybrid Ecologies aims to present four contemporary artistic positions working in the field of sculpture, cyber ecology, and eco fiction: Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick, Carla Gannis, Joanna Hoffmann, and Tamiko Thiel. They all deal with new technologies and forms of display, thus developing a site-specific sculptural aesthetics of the living, along with expanded possibilities of the sculptural in the digital age. Their artificial creatures seem to live as post-evolutionary prototypes departing from an augmented ecology. This ecology is less based on mimesis than on speculative, hybrid inventions. Thinking about potential worlds and futures in our post-nature society, the exhibition references traditional sculpture parks, including their specific relationship between surrounding nature, architecture,and the artifact. Contrary to the stasis and durability of classical statues, the digital sculptural interventions occupy the site. This immersion stimulates the overlap and interaction of heterogeneous realities and provokes new contexts of ephemerality, scalability, kinetic plasticity, and tech-based posthumanistic narratives.

The concept of MoMAR, an unauthorized non-profit gallery, is to democratize physical exhibition spaces, museums, and the curation of art within them. The exhibition occupies prestigious museum spaces around the world to connect the concept of eco-fictional shifts to said spaces. This process reestablishes what is called the canon of (art) history while invading physical locations with today’s technological possibilities, questioning institutions and their hierarchies, structures and programmes.

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About the artists

Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve. This implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognise their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understanding of creativity.
Feileacan McCormick is a Norwegian artist, creative technologist, researcher & former architect based in Berlin whose practice meditates on ecology, nature & generative arts, with a focus on giving non-human new forms of presence & life in digital space. Founder of Entangled Others Studio together with Sofia Crespo. Highly influenced by the development of new deep learning technologies, they reshape meditations on nature into an appreciation for the biodiversity that enriches our planet.
Link

Carla Gannis
Carla Gannis is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces works that consider the uncanny complications between grounded and virtual reality, nature and artifice, science and science fiction in contemporary culture. Fascinated by digital semiotics, Gannis takes a horror vacui approach to her artistic practice, culling inspiration from networked communication, art and literary history, emerging technologies and speculative design.
Link

Joanna Hoffmann
Joanna Hoffmann is a visual artist and a professor at the University of Art in Poznań (UAP), Leader of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Projects & Research at UAP and Co-Founder of the Art & Science Synergy Foundation and Chair of the Art & Science Node in Berlin. She works in the field of multimedia installation, VR, experimental video-animation and interactive projects.
Link

Tamiko Thiel
Tamiko Thiel is a digital artist who works with an array of New Media techniques including AR, VR, video installation, net art and 3D-printing. Her work often explores the interplay of space, the body, and cultural identity. Here works are haunted by concepts of the garden as a lost paradise, as well as endangered ecosystems due to global warming and climate change. A founding member of the artist group Manifest.AR, she participated in the guerrilla AR intervention at MoMA NY in 2010, and was a main curator and organizer of their uninvited intervention at the Venice Biennial in 2011.
Link

About the curators

​Tina Sauerlaender
​Tina Sauerlaender is an art historian, curator, speaker and writer based in Berlin. She focuses primarily on the impact of the digital and the internet on individual environments and society. She is artistic director of the VR Art Prize by DKB in cooperation with CAA Berlin. She is co-founder and director of the independent exhibition platform peer to space, that was founded in 2010. She is co-founder of Radiance VR, an international online platform for VR experiences in visual arts. She is founder of the SALOON, an international network for women working in the arts. Tina Sauerlaender lectures internationally on the topic of VR art e.g. at the re:publica (Berlin), at the ZKM (Karlsruhe), at the New Inc (New York), or the Kunsthalle (Munich).
Link

Ursula Ströbele
Ursula Ströbele is research associate at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, where she is head of the Study Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art. Before, she was teaching at University of the Arts in Berlin (2012-2018) and co-founded the DFG-scientific network Theory of Sculpture. In 2019 she was artistic director of Kunstverein Arnsberg. She holds a PhD at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (The reception pieces of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture 1700-1730) and in 2020 she was habilitated with a work about the sculptural aesthetic of the living. Non-human living sculpture since the 1960s, Hans Haacke and Pierre Huyghe. Her current focus is amongst others: digital, time-based sculptures since 1960, art and ecology, female sculptors of the 20th century, ephemeral images.
Link

Gallery

Welcome to MoMAR. An unauthorized gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, museums, and the curation of art within them. MoMAR is non-profit, non-owned, and exists in the absence of any privatized structures. MoMAR uses Augmented Reality to overlay art onto existing artwork and frames housed in museums and gallery spaces around the world.

Downloading the MoMAR app, visitors hold their phones over specified frames and spaces in order to view alternate artwork, and MoMAR exhibits.

Download the MoMAR app below:

Visit Us

This time MoMAR takes place in MoMA's Sculpture Garden on the ground–floor.
Usually MoMAR is located in the former Jackson Pollock room, The Estée and Joseph H. Lauder Gallery on the 5th floor. We chose the room for two significant reasons. Firstly, it is part of the permanent collection and used to remain unchanged within the walls of the museum. Secondly, it has a bench.

The gallery is open seven days a week from 10:30am – 5:30pm.

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