Preview: The HMKV's Program for 2021
HMKV looks forward to the Beuys Year 2021 – with an SUV musical and technoshamanism in store
What's next and where is the journey headed? This question presents itself with particular urgency at this turn of the year. Media art is poised particularly well to address the question of how we can shape our future and what role technological developments can play in the process, as the exhibitions at the HMKV will demonstrate in 2021.
The first opening of the year, on 14 May 2021, invites visitors to an exhibition that paints a critical portrait of our globalized world accelerated by technology: Under the title The Pow(d)er of I Am Klick Klick Klick and a very very bad bad musical! the artist duo Stefan Panhans and Andrea Winkler presents four room-filling video installations and several sculptural works. Whether the works deal with electric SUVs, communication with Artificial Intelligences, everyday racism, celebrity cult, or the precarious status of cultural workers – the exhibition will develop core themes of the HMKV rarely seen in such density in a solo exhibition. Andrea Winkler was born in Zurich, Stefan Panhans in Hattingen (Ruhr) and both are based today in Hamburg and Berlin.
Another highlight of the year 2021 at the HMKV will be the exhibition Technoshamanism (opening 8 October 2021), which will be a part of the statewide program beuys 2021. 100 years of joseph beuys. This international group exhibition at HMKV takes Beuys' self-stylization as a 'shaman' as a starting point to give space to current artistic positions that deal with shamanism as a speculative technology and its possibilities for transforming the society: "The increased interest of a younger generation of artists in esotericism, shamanism, witches and tropes of healing could be dismissed as anti-enlightenment. But I wonder: Where does this interest come from - and why is it happening right now? I think it has to do with a fundamental discomfort with our technologically advanced society and the still unchecked capitalist overexploitation of nature. The figure of the shaman is used to counter the feeling of powerlessness," says curator and HMKV director Dr. Inke Arns. In the summer semester of 2021, Dr. Inke Arns will also offer a seminar on this topic as part of a guest professorship at the Münster Art Academy.
Currently, the HMKV is closed for the time being until 11 January, 2021. Nonetheless, the year 2021 begins with good news: The current exhibition Faţadă/Façade, which successfully opened in October 2020, has been extended until 11 April 2021. Visitors will thus have three more weeks in the new year to visit the large scale exhibition on Romani building culture. During the time of temporary closure and beyond, the HMKV provides various digital formats to deepen the exhibition's topic: Author Olga Felker will lead conversations with cooperation partners of the project in a second season of the podcast “How Roma reclaim living space” in early 2021, shedding light on the social and political contexts of Romani building culture as well as the history of ongoing racist discrimination against Roma in Europe. The first season of four episodes is already online and accessible on the HMKV’s website.
In addition, the research project Training the Archive, which set out in 2020, will be continued through 2021 (until 2023). In cooperation with the Ludwig Forum Aachen, the project investigates possible applications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in curatorial practice. The aim is to test the extent to which an AI can be trained in the research process of a curator. With the help of machine learning, patterns, connections and associations between artworks can be revealed that are not (or no longer) apparent to the human eye in this form. Problems of automated pattern recognition, such as algorithmic biases, will also be investigated. The project is scientifically supported by the artist Francis Hunger (Leipzig) since fall 2020. The first interim results will be published from 2021 in the form of a blog and in specialist publications.
The HMKV closes the year 2020 with good news for the medium-term future: The Ruhr region has been selected as venue for the European Nomadic Biennale Manifesta in 2026. The application was initiated by a circle of renowned cultural workers from the region, among them Dr. Inke Arns, director of the HMKV.
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HMKV Annual Program for 2021
24 October 2020 – 11 April 2021 (extended)
Faţadă/Façade – Exhibition, workshop, public programme
HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) at the Dortmunder U, level 3
Currently closed until 11 January, 2020. We will inform promptly about a possible reopening at www.hmkv.de.
Based on the collaborative art project of the Mallinckrodtstraße workshop on Romani building culture of the same name and the redesign of a building façade in the Nordstadt district of Dortmund in September 2019, the Faţadă/Façade exhibition focuses on a special form of architecture that has arisen in Romania, among other places, in the last 30 years. This is distinguished by expressive façades, in which many different forms of design are found. In addition to many building models that originated in the context of the project and that are on view in the exhibition, members of the Mallinckrodtstraße workshop have also realised a redesigning of the HMKV's entrance area. An (online) event programme enables in-depth examination and discussion of the many different aspects of the project. The exhibition magazine will be published in January 2021 by Verlag Kettler (136 p., numerous illustrations, German/Romanian/English, 10,00 € / 18,00 €).
A project by HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), Interkultur Ruhr and Werkstatt Mallinckrodtstraße
Partner of the project: Djelem Djelem – Dortmund Festival for Roma Cultures
Funded by: City of Dortmund, Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Fonds Soziokultur, Kunststiftung NRW
The accompanying digital and discourse programme is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Interkultur Ruhr is a project of the Regionalverband Ruhr.
15 May – 05 September 2021 (opening: Friday, 14 May 2021)
Stefan Panhans / Andrea Winkler
The Pow(d)er of I Am Klick Klick Klick Klick and a very very bad bad musical!
HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) at the Dortmunder U, level 3
The title of the exhibition by Stefan Panhans (DE) and Andrea Winkler (CH) refers to the rhetoric of US evangelical megachurches, in which a neoliberal ideology of individual self-optimization is preached - disguised as Christian ethics. In their works, the artists draw an impressive but critical portrait of a globalised world accelerated by technology: It is about SUVs, communication with Artificial Intelligences, everyday racism, celebrity cult and role clichés, the 'Uncanny Valley' and other post-digital feedback loops between people and virtual worlds, and last but not least about the precarious status of cultural workers.
The exhibition will feature four large video installations and various sculptural works. The large-scale video installations are the three new productions Border Control (2021, in production), Defender (2021, in production) and If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is (2020) as well as HOSTEL (2018) and Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 (2016).
Andrea Winkler, *1975 in Zurich, based in Hamburg and Berlin / Stefan Panhans, *1967 in Hattingen (Ruhr), based in Hamburg and Berlin
Funded by: City of Dortmund, Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of NRW, VISIT-Scholarship of the E.ON Foundation, and others.
09 October 2021 – 06 March 2022 (opening: Friday, 08 October 2021)
Technoshamanism
- in the framework of „beuys 2021. 100 jahre joseph beuys“ of the State of NRW -
HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) at the Dortmunder U, level 3
With the figure of the shaman that Joseph Beuys cultivated throughout his career as its starting point, this exhibition focuses on »techno-shamanistic« artistic positions today. The artists in question not only regard shamanism as a technology in its own right, they also use other (speculative) technologies to seek out shamanic energies. Many of the tropes that Beuys so iconically employed to heal and transform society, to cultivate a spiritual connection with the environment, to overcome the power and the logic of capital are now deployed by contemporary artists, who thus update his strategies and questions for the digital age.
Funded by: City of Dortmund, Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of NRW, NEUSTART KULTUR, and others.
Throughout 2021
Training the Archive
– A research project on AI in cooperation with Ludwig Forum Aachen –
Hardly any other aspect of digitalization is as controversial as the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is today. AI has the potential to transform our current socio-cultural and political structures, reaching deep into the experience of everyday life. Together with the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund, a group of researchers from the Ludwig Forum Aachen is working to map the developments in AI, critically reflect on them, and investigate their potential applications in museum practice. Training the Archive – a new research initiative – was thus launched in early 2020. Over the next four years (2020–2023), the research project Training the Archive will explore the possibilities and risks of using AI to automatically structure data in order to support curatorial practice and artistic production.
Funded by „Fonds Digital – Für den digitalen Wandel von Kulturinstitutionen“, the Digital Culture Program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes)
January - December 2021
HMKV Video of the Month
In the HMKV Video of the Month series, HMKV presents current video works by international artists on a monthly basis - selected by Inke Arns. On view online at www.hmkv.de as well as at the HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) at the Dortmunder U, level 3.
January 2021
Marc Lee, Corona TV Bot, live generated TV show, 2020, 24/7
February 2021
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, MISS DMZ, video, 11:05 min.
March 2021
Martin Brand, CAUSALITY AND MEANING, UHD video, color, stereo, 2020, 9:17 min.
The videos for April - December 2021 will be announced soon.