Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

If you enter the term “art” into images search on Google, you will get an incredible number of hits. The same is true if you enter the term “original”: a colourful tapestry of images appears, through which the Internet user can scroll, generating new images at will with a mouse click. If therefore an artist today puts an elaborately wrought original on a canvas, he needs to have a damn good reason.

The rapid change in the perception and treatment of images in the past two decades is the theme of an exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel. Entitled Speculations on Anonymous Materials, it considers the flood of anonymous images on the Internet. To this end, the organizers invited twenty international artists to formulate statements. Ed Atkins, for example, who was born in Oxford in 1982, takes up the tension between medium (immaterial) and viewer (physical). In the digital HD format film, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, he has an avatar hold a monologue about death and loss.