The Witness

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Image activated by augmented reality, where 3D animated subjects and scenarios are integrated into a physical photograph. Inspired by the work of Carl Jung, the image is part of a larger series that explores themes such as identity, introspection and transformation. Through AR, game elements were introduced into the piece, offering virtual content unlockable through interactions.

Bio

Camila Magrane is a Venezuelan-American visual artist known for her augmented reality images, integrating 3D animated scenes and subjects into physical photographs. With experience in video game development and a passion for analog photography, she explores the dialogue between the virtual and physical worlds. Magrane’s images are inspired by surrealist compositions and reference the graphic hyperrealism of contemporary video game design.

Anonymity
This piece was developed as a ready-to-wear accessory which allows preemptive non-disclosure of the users identity at will. Allowing control over her anonymity as needed.

Les 1000 vies d’Isis
Les 1000 vies d’Isis (The 1000 lives of Isis) highlights the birth of an imaginary character created entirely by computer. A virtual identity whose daily life is imagined in images. The fictitious staging of these moments photographed in the South of France interrogates Photography and Portraiture by introducing a questioning on the nature of images, their link to reality and to the identity of the living.

self Portrait
Wearing’s self-portrait explores farce while examining the concepts of identity and representation.

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自画像
Wearing的自画像探索了闹剧，同时考察了身份和表征的概念。 Wearing注重细节和精致的有机硅修复物，可创造出非凡的自画像，模仿您家庭相册中的照片。这些图像之所以成功，是因为它们提出有关家庭，人际关系和自我的问题，所有这些问题在当代摄影中都很重要。系列中的其他肖像包括她的兄弟，祖母和祖父。

フセイン·チャラヤン
ЧАЛАЯН
후세인 샬 라얀
Gravity Fatigue
Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has created elasticated costumes and sequinned garments for performers in his first self-directed dance production (+ slideshow).The production is split into 18 chapters that each explore themes of identity, displacement and invisibility.

Constellations
File Festival
FILE HIPERSONICA

This work begins from the exploration of an imaginary celestial space which is translated into sound space. How does each celestial sphere – starting from its manifestation as a unit – interact with the cosmos where it belongs? How does it react to its law? How does it transform itself integrating with the system, until the loss of identity? In contrast to this process, the constellations act by highlighting the bodies in their uniqueness through the creation of symbolic links: beyond their meaning, they stand as a classification and articulation device of the individual within the system.
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Questo lavoro parte dall’esplorazione di uno spazio celeste immaginario che si traduce in spazio sonoro. In che modo ogni sfera celeste – a partire dalla sua manifestazione come unità – interagisce con il cosmo a cui appartiene? Come reagisce alla sua legge? Come si trasforma integrandosi con il sistema, fino alla perdita di identità? In contrasto con questo processo, le costellazioni agiscono mettendo in evidenza i corpi nella loro unicità attraverso la creazione di collegamenti simbolici: al di là del loro significato, si pongono come dispositivo di classificazione e articolazione dell’individuo all’interno del sistema.

Difference and Repetition
The title references Deleuze’s thesis ‘Difference and Repetition’ – his attempt to understand reality without referring to identities. The artists aim to ‘unidentify’ the audience – to criticize the bubbles of reality which technology has helped us to build around ourselves. By allowing ourselves to remove our identity occasionally, we can better understand the thoughts of those we disagree with and therefore better work together to build a combined reality. Difference (in both senses) is generated by the motion control system which continuously changes the pose of the mirrors relative to the viewer. This movement disrupts space itself, creating a transformation similar to that of a Lorentz transformation when one travels close to the speed of light. This causes space itself to compress, twist and break, giving the viewer a tool for observing the non-absolute nature of time.

The Eidolon Splits
The Eidolon Splits explores the construction of human form and identity within a narrative realm. It reflects and embodies the screen as a portal and contact surface both as a physical and a virtual device.

Immersed Garden
Immersed Garden is in its true sense a sunken world. Floating bodiless in an underwater garden, natural sounds guide you through an immersive surrounding, somewhere between calming and irritating, natural and artificial. It is a playful exploration of the individual conception of safety and confusion and a personal approach to aesthetic references to habits of introspection and retreat in digital environments. It was created by fusing different digital processes like photogrammetry of selected natural places around Karlsruhe and field recordings in a local natural reserve. Underwater videos hybridize with 3D scans of trees and plants while invisible frogs are croaking and humming birds are buzzing by synthetic flowers. The artistic aim was to explore the personal perception of calming and irritating, playing with the concept of immaterialness and attentiveness. The artwork creates aesthetic references to philosophical and scientific theories of introspection and identity.

The Robin Who Wondered If He Was a Nightingale
Various members of orchestra perform impressive improvisations based on your identity and the natural environment. The flutes combine their sounds with the rhythm of the percussion. The special acoustics of the forest played an important role. Every time an attempt is made to deliver the highest quality of improvisation and to achieve more than perfectly played notes. This creates a magical and unforgettable experience. Musicians: Nightingale, Cuckoo, Moorhen, Pigeon, Curlew, Black-billed Cuckoo, House Sparrow, Little Owl, Woodcock, Green Woodpecker, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Middle Spotted Woodpecker, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker.

Metabolism _ Invisible Cities
Pierre-Jean Giloux’s first monograph, the publication extends the eponymous video tetralogy inspired by the Japanese utopian architectural movement: Metabolism (1960-70).
The films of the Invisible Cities cycle are portraits of Japanese cities, superimposing filmed and photographed images of everyday, social and urban reality, with virtual images.
The book explores the links in Pierre Jean Giloux’s work that connect four Japanese cities with a rich architectural past (Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto). This jorney through Japan’s Megapolis traces the history of Japan and ends with the reconstruction of pavilions for the Osaka 70 Universal Exhibition and a virtual proposal for a smart city on the waters of Lake Biwa.
The metabolist utopia to which reference is constantly made in the work of Pierre Jean Giloux played a decisive role in the constitution of post-war Japanese cultural identity and had a notable influence on many contemporary architects.

video

object no. 9

Marleen Sleeuwits is inspired by impersonal environments—places that could be anywhere and nowhere—such as vacant zones in airports, unoccupied corridors of hotels, and empty rooms in office buildings. The Netherlands-based artist is attracted to these non-spaces for the lack of impression they leave on people; her work focuses on finding ways of visualizing the identity of these voids and connecting to them in novel ways. Through structural contradiction, illusion, and the manipulation of scale, she aims to transform viewers’ awareness of their surroundings.

surveillance exclusion
Camera’s and other technologies create a safer living environment than ever before. Mega databanks and high resolution cameras stock hundreds of exabytes a year. But who has access to this data? Not only the security department but also the advertisement industry is interested in this technology. They pay to use real time data to their advantage. They create advertisements that call your name, keep records of your personal interests and they follow you everywhere you go. By wearing this mask formed like a lens it possible to become unrecognizable for facial recognition software and because of it’s transparence you will not lose your identity and facial expressions. So it’s still possible to interact with the people around you.

Eggs Are Good For Your Hair
Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?

Wrapped up
With her installations, sculptures and photographs, Dutch artist Guda Koster transforms the human body and attaches a new identity to her characters or to herself, using clothing as the main visual art form, patterns and colours to create surreal stories.

ДЖЕННИС МАРКОПУЛОС
Cartoon Skull Mask

“The mask is an object worn over or in front of the face of a skull to hide the identity of it and by its own features to establish a part of a cartoon being. This essential characteristic of hiding and revealing personalities or moods is common to all masks. As cultural objects they have been used throughout the world in all periods and have been as varied in appearance as in their use and symbolism.
The wearer of the cartoon mask is considered to be in direct association with the spirit force of the mask and is consequently exposed to personal danger of being affected by it.The wearer of the cartoon mask is a skull and the person behind to the skull is not under the living persons.The ironic combination of two inappropriate items is to the stoic thinking to owe.”

Deep Screen
Muti Randolph lives in Rio de Janeiro and studied Visual Communications and Industrial Design at the Pontificia Universisade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. One of the pioneers in computer art, animation and 3d illustration in Brazil, he has been shifting from virtual 3d to real 3d spaces creating visual identities, graphics, illustrations, sets, and interior architecture projects for clients mainly in the entertainment, fashion and technology areas.

Me, My Selfie and I
Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?

COMO UM JABUTI MATOU UMA ONÇA E FEZ UMA GAITA DE UM DE SEUS OSSOS
The performance presents the audience with the image of a male body subjugated by an object: an orange high-heeled shoe whose heel is a 30-cm stake. Unable to stand and occupy an erect, masculine and dominating position, this body moves slowly across the horizontal plane through a choreography that condenses images referring to a woman’s objectification. Based on the transformation of the shoe and its placement on a male body, the work raises questions regarding gender identity and the role of objects in this process.

Amos Rex Museum
Amos Rex rethinks the urban park as part of our museum experience. Its structure is built with large concrete domes. This principle is very functional for museum use: it allows long column-free spans and flexible exhibition spaces. The domes contain skylights that introduce natural light into the galleries below as well as carefully selected views of life above. At street level, a new urban square has been created with a unique identity. The domes form an undulating landscape for people to enjoy, especially children. The Lasipalatsi building was restored respecting its valuable 1930´s Functionalist era interiors and details.

prototype
Viktoria Modesta is bionic artist, multimedia performance artist, creative director, DJ and a supporter of future innovations. Her work explores modern identity through performance, fashion, avant garde visuals, technology and science.

جانين أنتوني
珍妮安东尼
ג’נין אנטוני
재닌 안토니
Жанин Антони
Mortar and Pestle
“The eye and tongue in “Mortar and pestle” could become the tongue and eye of any advanced intimate partnership.”
Since the 1990s, New York–based artist Janine Antoni has established an international reputation with labor-intensive projects in a wide range of media. She incorporates both art history and personal exploration, investigating the ways in which contemporary definitions of aesthetics and art making are connected to issues of gender identity and sexuality. Inspired by the feminist artists of the 1970s, she reframes and subverts art-historical and societal conventions surrounding women and beauty.

Balance From Within
File Festival
Jacob Tonski is a pragmatic optimist whose work explores dynamic balance through kinetic metaphors.
A self-adjusting platform makes everyone the same height, probing ideas of equality and the origins of power. A larger-than-life top spins about the room, wobbling through themes of pleasure, danger, youth and decay. A sofa teeters, standing on one leg, musing on the stability of the social structures we build.
These and other human-scale objects, both amusing and threatening, find an uncanny identity between toys and tools. The forces of time and gravity serve in these works as foils for those things we are powerless to direct in our lives, and with which we must instead dance and negotiate.

Leah Schrager is a woman of her times. Using social media as her gallery, Schrager’s art explores digital identity, celebrity culture and the almighty selfie.
A resonant voice in the new feminist art wave, Schrager’s work often triumphs sex positivity by reframing the power dynamic between model and photographer and challenging the notion that provocative imagery is less than art.

Selbst
While the focus of Soltau’s work never ventures far from the female body and its bodily processes, often incorporating images of herself, at the heart of her practice is an inexhaustible search for identity and meaning.

جوانا فاسكونسيلوس
琼娜巴斯孔塞洛斯
ג’ואנה אסקונסלוס
ジョアナ·ヴァスコンセロス
ДЖОАНА ВАСКОНСЕЛОС
red independent heart
STARTING OUT FROM INGENIOUS OPERATIONS OF DISPLACEMENT, A REMINISCENCE OF THE READY-MADE AND THE GRAMMARS OF NOUVEAU RÉALISME AND POP, THE ARTIST OFFERS US A COMPLICIT VISION, BUT ONE WHICH IS AT THE SAME TIME CRITICAL OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY AND THE SEVERAL FEATURES WHICH SERVE THE ENUNCIATIONS OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY, ESPECIALLY THOSE THAT CONCERN THE STATUS OF WOMEN, CLASS DISTINCTION OR NATIONAL IDENTITY.

Cosmic Surgery
Originally from Germany, Alma Haser is currently based in London, UK. She received her photographic degree from Nottingham Trent University in 2010[…] Her most recent series titled, Cosmic Surgery, combines the tangible photograph and the subject with the photograph itself. This facet of the images creates distinctive stages. Alma as the viewer of the subject, the origami construction, and then the reconstruction is then photographed thus creating a new aspect of the subject’s identity.

Bule Bull
As an artist, Mella is equally known and committed. Her comments on prevailing social and political issues in Indonesian/a> society are revealing and insightful. These are issues of discrimination, racialism, minorities and identity, which she finds she has an urge and responsibility to comment on in her art works.

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

جانين أنتوني
珍妮安东尼
ג’נין אנטוני
재닌 안토니
Жанин Антони
INGROWN
Since the 1990s, New York–based artist Janine Antoni has established an international reputation with labor-intensive projects in a wide range of media. She incorporates both art history and personal exploration, investigating the ways in which contemporary definitions of aesthetics and art making are connected to issues of gender identity and sexuality. Inspired by the feminist artists of the 1970s, she reframes and subverts art-historical and societal conventions surrounding women and beauty.

Annett Zinsmeister is a german artist based in Berlin. She received her diploma at UDK – University of Arts and Design in Berlin[…] Her work has been shown in international exhibitions and museums, it is part of public and private collections and published in numerous publications. In her work she focuses on the intersection of art and architecture. She creates large-scale installations, conceptual and built spaces, photography, drawings, films and collages dealing with space. Recurring fundamentals in her oeuvre are the analysis, use and creation of modular principles, multiples, structures, patterns; and themes referring to the search for identity and utopian ideas, social interaction, communication, and the transformation of urban space.

Sidi Larbi Chekaoui, Damien Jalet and Anthony Gormley

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet joined forces with visual artist Antony Gormley to create Babel(words), a dance performance that explores language and its relationship with nationhood, identity and religion. Taking the tale of ‘The Tower of Babel’ as its starting point, Gormley’s 5 huge 3-dimensional frames hint at a nameless intersection in a faceless city near the borders that define a no man’s land. We watch as the action flows from private to public, intimacy to extroversion, and the individual to the collective – while choices of faith, space and community are made and we are reminded that to some the tale of Babel represents the gates to enlightenment, to others – chaos, confusion and conflict.

“Katja is inspired by the influence of everydays’ digital technologies on society and with that the arising questions about the identity of our human body. She fuses everydays’ technology, the dancers’ body and the presence of the audience into unconventional performances. Who moves who?”

Yellow lambo
The piece, “YELLOW LAMBO” (2018)[…] is a reference to a half-serious joke in the crypto community about using profits to buy Lamborghinis.“I became familiar with #lambo as a declaration of success-identity, and because I always think in terms of how to distill emotions around value, I wanted to explore that,” Mr. Abosch said. He created another token, called YLAMBO, and turned its address into a physical sculpture in yellow neon. This sculpture then sold for $400,000 at a San Francisco art fair to Michael Jackson, the former chief operating officer of Skype. The meta-weirdness around the purchase of the art is at the heart of the questions Mr. Abosch wants to explore.

Джоан Джонас
جوان جوناس
조안 조나스
ジョーン・ジョナス
Joan Jonas, believing that sculpture and painting were exhausted mediums, became known for her pioneering work in performance and video art. Jonas, who studied sculpture and art history, was deeply influenced by the work of Trisha Brown, with whom she studied dance, as well as John Cage and Claes Oldenburg, particular in their exploration of non-linear narrative structure and form. Jonas’s own work has frequently engaged and questioned portrayals of female identity in theatric and self-reflexive ways, using ritual-like gestures, masks, mirrors, and costumes.

Bangkok-born artist Tintin Cooper‘s collages weave different images in popular media, such as sporting figures, to cut away the different faces and obscuring their identity. The themes of her work highlight society’s obsession with celebrity, and undermines this illusion by forming work that seems to shatter her subjects from within.

Reed Esslinger’s work takes many forms, (sculpture, installation, video, writing, etc.) but almost always involves fibers and theatre. Having spent 3 years living on Réunion Island, an Outer Seas Department of France in the Indian Ocean, Reed’s interest in the island’s linguistic and cultural creolization have led to visual metaphors for the elusive process of relinquishing, adding, and transforming parts of one’s identity. She ultimately loves stories- whether absorbing, recording, or recounting them, and sees teaching as a natural occasion for mutual authorship and exploration.

She’s my country

The Indian born, New York City based artist Rina Banerjee has a love of materials, heritage textiles, ethnicity and fashion, colonial objects and furnishings, historical architecture, and their ability to disguise, animate, locate their inherent meanings in her art work. While sculptures and drawings, paintings use a fusion of cultures and unravel our connected experiences an explosion of differences alternate the way we receive our identity. Banerjee says her work explores “specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences intertwined and sometimes surreal.”

NEVER AGAIN
Since the nineties, artist Monica Bonvicini has confronted audiences with drawings, installations, videos, and photographs that explore the construction of sexual identity through architecture. Her large-scale sculptural works provoke modernism with sheets of shattered glass and non-functional metal scaffolds and include feisty sexual references with strategic placement of riveted black leather.

THE MASQUERADE OF THE REAL
“I am a German artist based in Berlin working in the field of photography, video and installations. The main focus of my photographs is identity and the role of the human body within society. Image-generating media like photography, television, and film and their use in advertising and the internet impose increasing demands on the body and subject it to a process of abstraction, while at the same time leading to the emergence of a public opinion, the solidification of images as role models with gender-specific attributes.”

Commune
David Rosetzky works predominantly in video and photographic formats, creating scenarios in which human behaviour, identity, subjectivity, contemporary culture and community come under intimate observation. He has been making portraits since the early 1990s, using the format to explore relationships between interiority and exteriority, reality and fantasy, authenticity and artificiality. Technically and aesthetically precise, Rosetzky’s work is stylised, moody and strikingly beautiful, and resembles the idealised images found in high-end advertising and screen culture.

Ways of Water – A Love Potion for Nature
Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carter’s collaborative work is interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and site and context responsive spanning performance, happenings, interventions, sound, video and installation. Through their practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human both as individuals and as a ‘collective entity’. Their work addresses notions of belonging, cultural identity, the dynamics within relationships, harmony through conflict and the transformation of limitations.

Hera Buyuktasciyan is a Greek-Armenian rooted artist living and working in Istanbul. As a concept she works generally on anything considered as ”The Other”. ”The Other” includes ; identity , belonging, xenophobia, socio-cultural and self memory. She uses metaphors from iconographic elements, stories, quotes and self narratives.

جوانا فاسكونسيلوس
琼娜巴斯孔塞洛斯
ג’ואנה אסקונסלוס
ジョアナ·ヴァスコンセロス
ДЖОАНА ВАСКОНСЕЛОС
Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau Réalisme and pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity.

Other Half Orbit
The installation consists of a large reflecting pool with built-in topographies to hold our bodies horizontally at exactly half-submersion. The images of our bodies become completed by reflection, and a secondary reflection of our shadows is cast on the wall. In the performance, we host an unscripted conversation about Ingrid’s memory loss, dreams, identity, and the possibility that we may never know one another fully.

Side Walk
By performing non-material and material elements in poetic arrangements within temporal related spaces, Ting-Jung Chen discusses the tension between the subjectivity and the objects. By studying Today’s phenomena and reproducing “human’s relationship with cultural and industrial artifacts” in the works, she demonstrates in her aesthetic practice a critical approach to “transformed identity” and its makeshift dwelling.more…

We Share Our Chemistry With the Stars (XX200)
The works measure two metres across, with Quinn describing them as ‘stealth portraits’, at once unique and universal and not just an image of the sitter, but an actual visual index of their identity. Using a macro-lens, Quinn captures the sitter’s iris in incredible detail and then uses an airbrush technique to apply oil paint onto canvas, transforming the images into these large-scale works. The eye appears virtually abstract and the pupil appears like a aperture or hole in the centre of a fine, detailed network of colourful lines.more…

פיונה טאן
フィオナ·タン
Фиона Тан
فيونا تان
Rise and Fall
Fiona Tan explores storytelling, memory, and the part they play in the formation of identity throughout this exhibition of five video installations, various associated sketches and one single-channel video. Rise and Fall (2009), elongated projections onto two large, side-by-side screens, is a wordless meditation, set to music, of a woman no longer young but still conscious of her looks; she was clearly a beauty in her youth. As the video proceeds we gather that the young woman pictured on the second screen is the memory of her younger self. They often move through domestic activities (sleeping, bathing, dressing) in parallel; this is inter-cut with scenes of violently rushing water (shot at Niagra Falls, it turns out). It’s a hackneyed metaphor – the water’s endless surging as an image of time’s relentless uni-directionality – but in Tan’s hands that doesn’t seem to matter; she creates extraordinarily emotional work out of simple stories and well-worn themes.

Reface [Portrait Sequencer]

Reface [Portrait Sequencer] by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (2007) is a surreal video mash-up that composes endless combinations of its visitors’ faces. Based on the Victorian “Exquisite Corpse” parlor game, the Reface installation records and dynamically remixes brief video slices of its viewers’ mouths, eyes and brows. Reface uses face-tracking techniques to allow automatic alignment and segmentation of its participants’ faces. As a result, visitors to the project can move around freely in front of the display without worrying about lining up their face for the system’s camera. The video clips recorded by the project are “edited” by the participants’ own eye blinks. Blinking also triggers the display to advance to the next set of face combinations. Through interactions with an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed, Reface makes possible a new form of inventive play with one’s own appearance and identity. The resulting kinetic portraiture blends the personalities and genetic traits of its visitors to create a “generative group portrait” of the people in the project’s locale.

БОХЬЮН ЮН
윤보현
Transparent Business Suit

“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; they mold our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” -Virginia Woolf. Uniforms group people in simplified versions of our social strata and take away our identity and individuality. In my transparent suit, I wanted to break the rigid impositions of the formal suit. Therefore, I juxtaposed the suit of a businessman and the naked body.