A new, web-based project
December 10, 2020
Realness exists on many levels and through different perspectives and temporalities. What is real about an entire continent, a country, or a person?
ARE YOU FOR REAL is a new, participatory web-based project, testing unique and interactive artistic practices. It brings together artists, researchers, filmmakers, writers and coders to create exclusive works, each offering an understanding of and approach towards the concept of “reality.”
Initiated by ifa and curated by Julia Grosse, Paula Nascimento and Yvette Mutumba, ARE YOU FOR REAL launches in December with newly commissioned participative and interactive digital works by artists Nushin Yazdani & Can Karaalioglu and Nolan Oswald Dennis via an online platform designed and coded by Yehwan Song.
How do we interpret and apprehend what we are seeing and experiencing? Are privileged perspectives becoming more real than others? Who can judge if something is real? Who is allowed to judge? Can digital space ever be a neutral location?
ARE YOU FOR REAL is about engaging with and visualising connections of people, thoughts, things, and places—communication happening through the trading and training of data. It addresses the material and immaterial aspects of the digital, and how these are perceived from the perspectives of various disciplines.
This ongoing project is a platform of exchange that supports formats such as exhibitions, workshops, digital art spaces and apps. Physical events will be planned over the course of the project, taking place in arbitrarily chosen sites, as wide-ranging as betting halls, post offices, gaming venues and cultural centres.
While there is no intention of forming a linear narrative, a thread links events and creates moments of encounter, generating conversations between perspectives and concepts and exploring the overlaps and interstices that link fields, formats, and contexts. Contributors have been and will be commissioned to create works that offer us various understandings of, and approaches to, reality.
ARE YOU FOR REAL aims to create an international cultural exchange as well as a contemporary co-creative practice of exhibition-making, challenging the inflexibility of the classic touring format while investigating other models. The artworks produced will change over the course of the project, as new artists join and take over, add and react. This means that certain qualities of a travelling exhibition will become visible, articulated through the touring of thought and the changes and traces in each work.
Among the projects being launched in December 2020 are works by artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Nushin Yazdani & Can Karaalioglu and contributors Ibrahim Cissé & Asmaa Jama, João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Ainslee Alem Robson & Kidus Hailesilassie and Michelle M. Wright.
About the artworks
Nolan Oswald Dennis (developed with Noa Mori):
a sun.black, 2020, essay-game
Commissioned and produced on behalf of ifa, a sun.black is inspired by Dambudzo Marechera’s Black Sunlight and Toni Cade Bambara’s On the Issue of Roles, taking the form of a generative essay-game; a procedural study in distributed poetics where every fragmented statement is assembled from bits and pieces, estranged and recollected.
Nushin Yazdani & Can Karaalioglu:
Into the Pluriverse, 2020, VR work
feat. Aylin Karabulut, Dounia Hagenauer, Rafiou Bayor, Tiara Roxanne and Ulla Heinrich
Commissioned and produced on behalf of ifa, this virtual reality work explores the idea of what is real. With Into the Pluriverse, we enter through a wormhole into seven different lives, different places and different perspectives. One by one, we encounter seven people, Aylin Karabulut, Dounia Hagenauer, Rafiou Bayor, Tiara Roxanne and Ulla Heinrich, as well as the artists themselves, and experience how their thoughts interact.
How do these artists, scientists, and feminists envision our collective future? What do they fight and wish for? What do they have to say to each other? What questions arise within this discourse? We invite you to explore ARE YOU FOR REAL to find out.
About ifa
ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) is Germany’s oldest intermediary organisation for international cultural relations. It promotes a peaceful and enriching coexistence between people and cultures worldwide. ifa supports artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue and conference programmes, and it acts as a centre of excellence for international cultural relations. It is part of a global network and relies on sustainable, long-term partnerships. It is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart. www.ifa.de/en
Press contacts:
Joseph Lamb at Pickles PR
joseph [at] picklespr.com
Guido Jansen-Recken at ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)
presse [at] ifa.de
