December 8, 2024
ARE YOU FOR REAL expands international cultural exchange and contemporary exhibition practices through dialogue around digital world-making, aesthetic investigation, and performative political reflection. In arriving at Phase Two, the platform hosts artworks that explore how computation and the sciences relate to reality. Works commissioned for or featured on the platform converge into thematic clusters that manifest as planetary systems—disclosing a new cosmology of interpretations of the digital sphere.
On December 8, ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase Two releases its sixth and final cluster, Dead Futures: Figures, Hybrids, and Hauntology, featuring a newly commissioned work by Jazmina Figueroa and an online version of an installation by Simon Speiser. Taking up Mark Fisher’s idea that hauntology is the agency of the virtual, the cluster forms an inquiry into history, conflict, and myth. Variously evoking feminist thinking, ancient storytelling, Indigenous knowledge, and science fiction, the artworks summon the specters of mythological and historical figures to digitally reimagine stories of resistance, revive ancient traditions, and investigate conflict and colonization. What unites these works is the question of how specters of potential futures from the past influence discourse: how does hauntology, the non-existent, have real effects? If lost futures haunt the present, rediscovered knowledge can offer new perspectives.
Jazmina Figueroa’s A Tumulted Space is a multimedia radio play that layers soundscapes with an immersive script to recount the experiences of two historical figures who endured torture: twentieth-century anti-fascist partisan Irma Bandiera and seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Simon Speiser’s online version of La Visión del Monte reinterprets a mechatronic light sculpture representing spiritual encounters in Ecuador’s Esmeraldas rainforest; interviewing his father and other locals, Speiser collected tales that reflect the cultural fusion of African, Indigenous, and Spanish influences in their maroon society. Hagit Keysar and Ariel Caine’s Terra ex Machina builds on their ongoing mapping and 3D modeling work to investigate the colonization of space and visibility in Israel/Palestine; using DIY aerial photography, drone imagery, and photogrammetry, they visualize the infrastructure of a no-fly zone—examining its epistemic and ontological effects while reaffirming the irreducibility of human agency. Emilija Škarnulytė’s Riparia takes viewers on a poetic journey along the Rhône, utilizing photogrammetry and underwater sensors to examine its benthic and riparian zones alongside representations of the river’s tutelary goddesses, exposing the impact of human intervention and merging mythology with hydrology. Jonas Van and Juno B.’s Visage reimagines the myth of the “Mysterious Peacock,” a legendary figure in the Brazilian Northeast; the resulting spiritual sci-fi quest across imagined topographies is inspired by the popular Cordel literary tradition and dialogues from Octavia E. Butler. Connecting the cluster to Phase 1, Sayaka Katsumoto and Xiaoyu Tang’s A Trip to the Perfect Beach follows the artists as they wander spaces of water and sand in this world and the afterlife; they explore liminal states and spiritual transitions through Asian ideologies and theories of out-of-body experience.
A planet devoid of a featured artwork circulates on the Dead Futures subpage, a gesture of solidarity with artists facing censorship and persecution. It honors those who have withdrawn or refused to participate in ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 in the current context around the ongoing wars, symbolizing the resistance born from oppression of dissent.
ARE YOU FOR REAL was initiated by ifa in 2020. Phase 2 is curated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, with design and programming by Yehwan Song and sound design crafted by Enrico Boccioletti.
ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen works with partners worldwide to promote freedom in the arts, research and civil society by bringing people together who are committed to an open society. To facilitate this exchange, we are committed to generating analogue and digital spaces for people to network, negotiate and co-create. We give a voice to activists, artists and scientists, promote their collaboration and work closely with European partners to pursue our goals. ifa is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
Press contact: presse [at] ifa.de.
