Discussion
Emma Braslavsky and Agnieszka Pilat
Authors in Conversation
Discussion with two artists who have thought about the future of humanity: the author Emma Braslavsky has written the short story Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man) on which the recent film by Maria Schrader is based. The painter Agnieszka Pilat is best known for her series of heroic portraits of technology and machines. Both try to imagine how humans and machines will interact in the future.
The codes fed by all these stimuli, which decisively shaped her thinking and work in writing, curating, staging, solidified the paradox as the pillar of her tragicomic narrative approach, with the help of which she reflects on the meaning and future of humanity.
She has published multiple award-winning novels such as most recently the story Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man), nominated for the German Science Fiction Award and filmed, which became a spin-off to the award-winning and multiple nominated novel Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten (The Night Was Pale, the Lights Were Twinkling), or the audio comic series Agent Zukunft (Agent Future).
She works and lives in New York City and as a self-proclaimed machine chaser, she commutes between the east and west coasts in pursuit of emergent technologies. In her practice, Pilat is taking not just painting, but the genre of portraiture as a starting point: in art history, portraits reflect the power balance in society and she believes that today technology holds that power. “To understand the future, we must understand the machine”, says the artist.
Pilat’s exhibitions include Google, de Young Museum, Rochester Museum of Fine Arts Biennial, and Art Week Miami, FL.
In cooperation with the Centre for German and European Studies, Brandeis University.