We=Link:Sideways
Online exhibition 21.10.2020 - 23.05.2021
We=Link: Sideways is an online exhibition by Chronus Art Center, (CAC), that is co-presented with Arts at CERN and other ten international partners. It features twenty-two works by twenty-eight artists and artist collectives, spanning three decades of net art practice.
We=Link: Sideways is an online exhibition by Chronus Art Center, (CAC), that is co-presented with Arts at CERN and other ten international partners. It features twenty-two works by twenty-eight artists and artist collectives, spanning three decades of net art practice.
21 Nov 2020 - 23 May 2021
Back in February 2020, Chronus Art Center collaborated with Arts at CERN and other cultural institutions to jointly develop the online exhibition We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces, as a response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. We=Link has since become a new platform for presenting art online. With We=Link: Sideways, a further exhibition with a focus on net-based art is launched.
We=Link: Sideways features twenty-two works by twenty-eight artists and artist collectives, from the pioneers of net art to current practitioners. The works on display and online span three decades of net art practice, from arguably the first internet-era artwork of the Thing BBS in 1991 to the most current productions that continue to evolve after the exhibition opens.
Often referred to as the last Avant-garde of the twentieth century, the phenomenon largely dubbed as net art appearing in the early ’90s with the advent of the internet enjoyed an unrestrained flourishing period of prolific experimental, creative and critical engagement with the nascent new-media-fueled economy and its cultural and social ramifications. By 1997 the institutional acknowledgement of the once peripheral and fringe art practice along with the commodification of the internet made net art seem, according to art historian Dieter Daniels, to have “reached a dead end or turning point.”
This exhibition takes the purported net art’s “dead end” as a new starting point to chart a discursive trajectory of the practices since then, in the many manifestations of network-based art. Instead of prescribing it a categorical definition, the exhibition attempts to uncover the variegated developments, diverse strategies, critical positions and aesthetic experiments after the crash of the dot.com bubble, amidst the prevalence of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Sideways reveals the continuum of the Avant-garde “nettitudes” inherent in the works of these net artists. Read Sideways Curatorial Essay by Zhang Ga here.
Curator: ZHANG Ga
Artists: Wafaa Bilal, CHEN Pengpeng, Jonah Bruoker-Cohen, Matthieu Cherubini, Paolo Cirio, Leon Eckert, Ursula Endlicher, exonemo, Hervé Graumann, GUO Cheng, Vytas Jankauskas, Knowbotic Research, LAN, LIANG Yuhong, LIU Xing, Junas Lund, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kyle McDonald, Haroon Mirza, Everest Pipkin, Cornelia Sollfrank, Wolfgang Staehle, Ubermorgen, Maciej Wisniewski, XU Haomin, ZHAO Hua and ZHOU Peng’an.
We=Link: Sideways is an exhibition by Chronus Art Center (CAC) in collaboration with Arts at CERN (Geneva) | CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), Elektra (Montreal), Leonardo/ISAST, Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen), Light Art Space (Berlin) and in collaboration with artport of The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).