Friday, 20 June 2014, 24:00 | midnight

#56: Julieta Aranda

Julieta Aranda‘s multimedia project-based work has frequently focused on the dissemination of information and the agency of the individual in contemporary society. Her current works allude to the present historical moment, when it starts to be possible to dismantle the cultural imperative, and transform the media so that they can function as tools for collective use, rather than as instruments for cultural domination.

Julieta Aranda shows a modified version of her 8th Berlin Biennale film – shown as part of the installation Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into dark), 2014, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art – accompanied with a live concert in collaboration with Tisha Mukarji!

In addition, we will also screen Notes for a time/bank, 2012, 21:00 min – a film she made for dOCUMENTA 13.

The starting point for Julieta Aranda’s works for the 8th Berlin Biennale is her direct experience of zero gravity and its indirect echoes in the planetary paradox of entrapment and its “absolute” limits.

As a way to understand her own position as an artist sent to explore zero gravity conditions on behalf of the German / European flight research program, Aranda plots a visceral response to her uncanny “floating body” through video, installation, and a sound work based on her own electrocardiogram (EKG) recordings, and on the flight data of her time in zero gravity —”The perspective of perspective: A world mediated by a faulty image of the world”; produced in collaboration with composer Tisha Mukarji.

Aranda’s zero gravity flight rehearsals are also modes of establishing a relational matrix between the culture of cosmonauts, digital imaging of the Earth, astrophysics, ancient astronomy and future scenarios found in science-fiction novels. Her new work challenges conceptions of Earth-bound time to imagine life beyond the gravitational pull of recurrent global crises.

“The perspective of perspective: A world mediated by a faulty image of the world”

Musicians: Tisha Mukarji – Composer / Conductor, Margareth Kammerer – Voice, Derek Shirley – Contrabass, Klaus Kürvers – Contrabass, Ayumi Paul – Violin, Sabine Ercklentz – Trumpet, Bryan Eubanks – Soprano Saxophone

Julieta Aranda (b. 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a conceptual artist that lives and works in Berlin and New York City. She received a BFA in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts (2001) and an MFA from Columbia University(2006), both in New York. Her explorations span installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making. As co-director of e-Flux with Anton Vidokle, she developed the projects Pawnshop (currently in Beijing), and e-flux video rental, which started in the e-Flux storefront in New York in 2004, and has traveled to more than fifteen venues worldwide. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009), where she was the first artist to do a solo presentation for the “Intervals” exhibition series; Kunstverein Arnsberg (2010), MOCA Miami (2009), Witte de With (2010), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007), 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007), MUSAC Spain (2006), and VII Havana Biennial (2000), among others.