Spatial affairs

The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art presents the physical and digital exhibition Spatial Affairs and HyMEx, a two-day symposium that both seek to engage with a contemporary shift largely attributable to the rapid development and ubiquitous presence of computation and information technology.

Questioning the inner consistency of space, its philosophical and ontological status, its attachment and relationship to reality, has long been a latent undercurrent in the visual arts. This occasionally passionate, other times rather secretive attachment to such ontological affairs may have caused strong feelings in certain betrayed parties-narrative, for example-yet the relationship has proved to have a persistent hold.

If its termination is unthinkable, questioning around space and its entanglement with reality has also been continually reframed by the proliferation of immaterial spheres that have become legitimate parallel dimensions of our perception, expression, experience, knowledge, communication, and analysis. With the arrival of generative imagery, reflecting on this only becomes more pertinent.

The exhibition Spatial Affairs explores artistic reactions to these matters, including pre- and post-computational approaches from the early avant-garde through conceptualism to very recent works of art. In Spatial Affairs the binary relationship between the actual and the virtual, the real and the possible, evaporates into a multidimensionality in which the only betrayed party is dualism, leading to exploded axes of complex and multiplied notions of space.

Spatial Affairs. Worlding is an exploratory online environment, a virtual “multi-user” exhibition populated by crawling artworks, where visitor’s avatars are mingling with moving bodies of exhibited net.art and browser-based projects. The platform is designed by The Rodina. Soundscape by Enrico Boccioletti.

Exhibiting artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Andreas Angelidakis, Carola Bonfili, Adam Broomberg & Guy De Lancey & Brian O’Doherty, Petra Cortright, Agnes Denes, Aleksandra Domanović, Louise Drulhe, Wojciech Fangor, Stanislav Filko, Lucio Fontana, Dora García, Sam Ghantous, János Gulyás, Hans Hollein, Lauren Huret, Jodi, Hiroshi Kawano, Katarzyna Kobro, Alicja Kwade, Oliver Laric, Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain, Jan Robert Leegte, Lou Cantor, Stano Masár, Cildo Meireles, Rosa Menkman, Metahaven, Imre Nagy, Georg Nees, Robert Olawuyi, Gyula Pauer, Goran Petercol, Sascha Pohflepp & Alessia Nigretti & Matthew Lutz, Angels Ribé, The Rodina, Rafaël Rozendaal, Jeffrey Shaw, Andrej ©kufca, Károly Tamkó Sirató, Viktor Timofeev, Unrated/Besorolás Alatt, Gyula Várnai