UNSTABLE MEDIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Bringing together some of the most radical voices from the past three decades, the exhibition UNSTABLE MEDIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY presents around 40 landmark works from Centre Pompidou’s New Media collection. The uncertain fate of emerging technologies has always challenged the standards of continuity and permanence expected of a museum collection. And yet these technologies have shaped our sensory memory and become sedimented within us over time, even forming what might be likened to a second skin. Their impermanence is equalled only by the long-term resonance they imprint upon perception, the imagination, and the constant reworking of knowledge.

UNSTABLE MEDIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY invites visitors to explore recent developments in this field of artistic creation through a broad scope of different forms, gestures, and situations. The exhibition investigates how artists appropriate the media of their time and continually reinvent narratives of image and sound, embracing at times their non-linear paths through computer programming and circulation in networks. Unfolding across nine chapters, it addresses the main lines of inquiry influencing these practices today: the representation of time and the exploration of digital materiality; the dissolution of narrative and the mise en abyme of archives; confrontations with colonial history and the capacity for a work of art to serve as a locus of enunciation; and finally, investigations of the body as image and the image as body.

Large-scale installations enter into dialogue with miniatures, movement is reflected in stillness and organic and simulated life permeate each other, taking on each other’s forms. The exhibition’s design suggests an open pathway, full of bends, loops and changing perspectives conducive to speaking of a history that has yet to be constructed.

Several generations of artists resonate with one another, ranging from the mature works of pioneering artists such as Sonia Andrade, Harun Farocki, Francis Alÿs, Christian Marclay, Penny Siopis, and Pierre Huyghe, to the manifesto-like works that illustrate more recent artistic trajectories, such as those of Fiona Tan, Jérôme Bel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Omer Fast, C.B. Evans, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Saodat Ismailova, Wang Tuo, Laura Henno, Thao Nguyen Phan and Sarah Meyohas.

The New Media Collection was created in the mid-1970s with the opening of Centre Pompidou, and is a leading collection that currently holds over 3000 works. Centre Pompidou is closed until 2030 for extensive renovation work. The last major touring exhibition, “Video, an Art, a History” was presented at nearly ten institutions in France and around the world between 2007 and 2011.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln, 288 pages, English edition). The publication is available in the museum shop for 35 euros as well as in bookshops (39,80 euros) and at www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de.

Participating artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Robert Alice, Francis Alÿs, Sonia Andrade, Éric Baudelaire, Jérôme Bel, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Claude Closky, Brice Dellsperger, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, C.B. Evans, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Simone Forti, Laura Henno, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Pierre Huyghe, Saodat Ismailova, Eisa Jocson, Isaac Julien, Kao Chung-Li, Hassan Khan, Sonia Khurana, Lee Kit, Lu Yang, Christian Marclay, Sergey Maslov, Sarah Meyohas, Rhea Myers, Deimantas Narkevičius, Paul Pfeiffer, Thao Nguyen Phan, Penny Siopis, Hito Steyerl, Melati Suryodarmo, Mika Tajima, Fiona Tan, Wang Tuo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Elsa Werth

An exhibition jointly organised by the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Centre Pompidou.