This project started when I was an Artist-in-Residence at Art Space Portsmouth, UK as an inquiry into the possibilities of live streaming of sculpture installations and crowdsourcing as a method for artistic production. It was later shown at; Göteborgs Konsthall; Virserum Konsthall; Galleri 54; Galleri Pictura, Sweden; Furtherfield Gallery, London; ASPEX Portsmouth; Art + Gallery, Shanghai, China.
Göteborg Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden
Part of the exhibition: Love Explosion!
[crowdsourced] NOIR / Love Beyond Recognition*
Josefina Posch explores the dividing line between the private and the public, working with the tension between a scientific and a voyeuristic form of observation. She focuses on the point where technology, cloning, stereotypes, ideas and fiction meet. At times the “uncanny valley phenomenon can arise “ that eerie moment when a humanoid object (a robot for instance) seems to be close but not quite close enough to the human. In Posch´s work this permits an important point of view, a critical space in which, confronted by these humanoid sculptures, we have time to reflect over what it means to be human with other people“ how we look at them, what we see. The art historical distinction between the renaissance and the baroque is also present in Posch´s art. We recognise renaissance stress on harmony and ideal proportions while at the same time we note the baroque sculpting movement in various ways “ like figures in a stage of creation in a laboratory, or in a stage of meltdown, or in the act of taking a step, or in the form of inflatable objects at risk of losing their air. Posch works with a number of different techniques and media. Installation, drawing, sound, aromas and social experiments are some examples.
*partial title inspired from Jan Verwoert, Tell me what you want, what you really, really want p.167
Text excerpt from the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Love Explosion at Göteborgs Konsthall
Curators: Ola Åstrand och Mikael Nanfeldt
Artists: Patrik Bengtsson, Erik Berglin, Nina Bondeson, Gabo Camnitzer, Eva Dahlin, Omid Delafrouz, Den Stora Vilan, Elisabet Eriksson, Ulla Hammarsten McFaul, Frauke, Nilofar Kosheshi, Jonathan Ollio Josefsson, Rasmus Lindgren, Sara Lännerström, Bo Melin, Mandana Moghaddam, MonoMono, Mattias Norström, Josefina Posch, Petra Revenue, Dana Sederowsky , Gustav Sparr, Surreal Lovers, Pecka Söderberg, Mauritz Tistelö, Sara Trovik, Sofia Änghed.
Furtherfield Gallery, London, UK with Interactive Live Streams from Konstepidemin, Sweden
[crowdsourced] NOIR / Love Beyond Recognition
The simplicity of searching the Internet using a keyword makes the vastness of its resources accessible to the individual user. Without this way of ordering the quantity of material available the experience would be completely overwhelming. So in a way, the partial, chipping away we do keyword by keyword allows us to make the Internet our own. Away from the datasphere, in the more temporal realm of Josefina Posch´s installation at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg visitors could peak through the Venetian blinds to catch glimpses of two suspended figures moulded from jesmonite. To see the entirety of both figures would reveal an amalgam of the body parts of 15 people ranging from 6 to 75 years of age. Each of the body parts were donated because the person was either particularly fond of or self-conscious about them – an abnormally big toe for example, or a paunch which one gentlemen apparently offered to Posch with some pride. The combined parts are a literal manifestation of the old masters´ understanding that there is not one perfect being, but that you need aspects of different people in order to show a “perfect” appearance. Here, the encounter is one of strangeness as our expectation of the nude as a beautiful apparition is confronted with unsightly toes and a bloated belly. Within a hexagon architecture (recalling the honeycomb formation of a bees nest, the original crowdsourcers) of floor to ceiling blinds, the couple are enclosed in the space along with our prejudice about what a body should look like. Posch describes how, although not perfection, they are not not perfection either. Their imperfections make them more real by emphasising the fallible humanity from which they take their form, a reminder that the high performance we demand of technology is not necessarily applicable to our bodies and ourselves which are beyond recognition in this sense.
The exhibition in Sweden was one half of a two-part show happening simultaneously in Gothenburg and London at Furtherfield Gallery situated in the middle of Finsbury Park. Although there was nothing material for the artist to install in London apart from a couple of enlarged photographs of the installation and a projector connected to a laptop showing a live feed from Gothenburg, it was important that viewers made the journey to the park to interact with the installation instead of connecting to the broadcast remotely from their computers at home.
Both exhibitions became animated by a London visitor keying in a search term into the Film Noir database on the freely accessible “Internet library” Archive.org to generate audio clips from the films referring to the subject entered which would be played alongside the projection of the installation, whilst also being heard by guests to the exhibition in Gothenburg. Every ten minutes the models rotated along a system of pullies so viewers in London could see that it was a live video stream. As another aspect of the crowdsourcing contributing to the exhibition, the point where the viewer engages with the “liveness”of the situation was key to Posch´s conception of the piece, as her insight into how in our post Web 2.0. era of interaction we search for the unforeseen on our screens, as we might have been fascinated with recorded media previously (and perhaps real-life before that!). Although Posch doesn’t judge whether this is good or bad, “just different”, she says. With unerring pragmatism, she proposes that the Internet can be used as an exhibition resource in this way – if we are really just anticipating the moment of interaction with the artwork galleries need not spend huge amounts on shipping and installing the works but this model might allow for the energy to be used more responsibly, in the studio for example. Posch speaks about how she doesn’t wish to be so responsible in other areas of her practice and makes a point of not attributing everything she does to a predetermined concept. Attempting to lead by her intuition and not by the professional demands of the market or good-doing ideology, she wishes to ask only “How not to proceed?”. Notwithstanding, her work suggests a passion for people and the variance of intersubjective experience which, as it is developed in conversation, offers the viewer many layers of interpretation to be critically unpicked.
By Shama Khanna – an independent curator, writer, educator and grower from London. They are the founder of Flatness, a long-running online platform for artists’ moving image and network cultures of the screen and the land invested in curating through a queer decolonial lens.
Galleri 54, Göteborg, Sweden and Art + Gallery, Shanghai, China
The Logic of Basho < Here´s Looking at You Kid >
In the winter of 2012, Art+ Shanghai Gallery hosted a screening of a live web streaming video installation from Josefina Posch titled The Logic of Basho / Here´s Looking at You Kid. The project was an investigation into the broadcast of art installations as an alternative to the traditional staging of exhibitions in gallery and museums. Posch developed a special web application that allowed for the streaming of footage from three different cameras and a program that would select at random one camera and a period of time. The installation mounted in a gallery in Göteborg, Sweden was broadcasted to Shanghai. The general idea was to transfer the presence of art installations in remote towns to cultural centres around the world. The exhibition added to the significant international dialogue about the nature of ways of exhibiting and seeing art emerging in China. Heres Looking at Your Kid illustrated an enduring relevance of abstraction today by reconfiguring influences of predecessors with contemporary concerns. In Posch´s case, her critique of the authority of traditional displays and gallery settings, came in the form of work that speaks to the impermanence of ideas through the use of video. The video projection streamed to the gallery wall touched on the physical make-up and emotional realities of being human. Using sculptures caste from different ethnic backgrounds, Josefina reshaped the human body to create two multi-ethnical male and female subjects. A scripted recording of quotes from cliché romance films plays over a 3- channel recording between the two mannequins and a cityscape, the live streaming explored the material concept of an exhibition while creating an international link between spectators in Sweden and China.
By Diana Freundl – former Art Director, Art+ Shanghai Gallery, China and currently Associate Director at Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada.
Galleri Pictura, Lund, Sweden with live streams to Aspex Gallery, UK
The Logic of Basho < Here´s Looking at You Kid >
In 2011 I was coordinating the exhibition The logic of Basho, in which artist Josefina Posh made interactive sculptural/video piece. This piece was being streamed to the United Kingdom live, making the gallery space virtual and without fixed walls. By showing parts of the exhibition at two various places at the same time, this work was an attempt to undo the boundaries between visitor, space and artwork. The most interesting art, in my opinion, is the kind of art that creates a dynamic of exploration throughout many dimensions for both the visitors and the actual gallery space.
During a period of time Posch had collected fragments of body parts from people of different ages and ethnical backgrounds; all with the aim of creating the stature and composition of the average human being. The approach derived from the techniques used by the great masters of the renaissance, where for instance Leonardo Da Vincis “The Vitruvian Man was an attempt to re-create the ideal human body. The body parts resulted in two sculptures, a man and a woman. These two sculptural installations where then placed in a pentagon. Through two peepholes, the viewer perceived the naked bodies of a man and a woman; on a voyeur distance. An ultraviolet light, chosen by Posch so any digital media could not register it, illuminated the sculptures. In other words, her installation could never be reproduced authentically. The bodies´ movements where filmed by web cameras and showed in a different room, live and streamed to the UK. We saw this as a way of using the space in a manner that looses the boundaries and formats, and the artist never meets its audience on the other side and they never see the actual art piece. In this kind of format, the exhibition space is a dynamic space; the art piece can be viewed and contextualized in more than one way, in different medias and in different spaces, depended on where the viewer stands and is located, the viewer became engaged in the art piece and becomes aware of the existence of their vision and experiences the piece in a very real way.
This exhibition was perfect example of how to react to the modern, interactive, Internet era. An era where art is observed on the Internet and the risk of such an alternative way of viewing is that we lose the important and direct experience with the work itself. Josefina Posch´s exhibition at Galleri Pictura loosened the boundaries of how to use the gallery space; the pieces existed at the same time somewhere else but could never be reproduced. Where the gallery space started and ended faded out and became secondary to the art pieces it self.
By Sofia Landström – a Swedish independent curator formerly board member of Gallery Pictura, working at artbyvideo and currently curator for communication and programs at Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden.
Virserums Konsthall, Virserum, Sweden
Part of the exhibition: Man måste faktiskt älska om kärlek i alla dess former, känsla och uttryck. // One must actually love – love in all its forms, feeling and expression.
Participating Artists;
Julia Bondesson, Sara Broos, Stefan Constantinescu, Joanna Rubin Dranger, Carolina Falkholt, Karolina Henke Joanne Hoffsten, Lars Isacson, Åsa Jungnelius, Dan Lindau, Josefina Posch, Anders Ribbegårdh