Morphecore Prototype AR

Daito Manabe

b. 1976, Japan

lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

Daito Manabe's work presents an endlessly dancing digital figure, continuously morphing into new shapes, moving beyond any logic of physics or laws of the universe. Extracted from MRI scans of the artist's brain, raw brainwave data is translated into digital movement that manipulates and choreographs Manabe's 3D-scanned human body, alongside visual noises and glitches generated by distracting thoughts in the brain. The work thus presents a new potential relation between the brain and the body, emphasizing the ability of the mind to move into the infinite, while the body is still bound to physical limitations of motion, gravity, volume, shape, and form.

Daito Manabe is an artist, programmer, and DJ. His works branch into a variety of fields and take a new approach to everyday materials and phenomena. His practice is informed by careful observation and a quest to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelations and boundaries delineating the analog and the digital, the real and the virtual.

Courtesy of the artist

Forget Me Not

Ori Gersht

b. 1967, Israel

lives and works in London, UK           

Ori Gersht's work toys with classic art historical conventions by evoking a 17th-century Dutch still life through hyper-realistic digital creation. The work presents a lush, sensuous bouquet of flowers set amidst the botanical gardens, accompanied by an accelerating bee hum that becomes almost unbearable. When the visitors are at touching distance, a violent explosion occurs, and the bouquet shutters into pieces that fill the air with fragments of glass, petals, stems, and insects, cascading slowly to the ground. The still-life image, created after Jan Brueghel the Elder's painting Flowers in a Wooden Vessel (1606/7), is dynamically transformed into an animated Abstract Expressionist composition. Alluding to both the creation of the universe and the concept of vanitas (signifying the inevitability of death and the transience of all earthly things), Gersht's work stands as a spectacular meditation on the infinite cycle of creation and destruction. Soon after the explosion, the voices of three scholars are heard, whispering in the grim void, as if carried by the wind; describing the once lush bouquet from a personal point of view, they offer different interpretations of the original painting that disappeared in the folds of time.

The work was developed from an earlier work by Gersht, Big Bang (2006), originally commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum for the 2006 exhibition Twilight,  subsequently featured in Santa Monica, Boston, Washington, Germany, and the National Gallery, London. Gersht's work has been recently featured in a number of exhibitions, including Unearthed: Photography's Roots, Dulwich Picture Gallery, UK; Flowers in Art, ARKEN Museum for Modern Art, Denmark; and The Expanded Landscape, Getty Center, The J. Paul Getty Museum, California; among others. His solo show titled Becoming will open at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York in October 2021.

Text and audio recordings by:

Ronni Baer, art historian, a scholar of Dutch, Flemish art, previously the senior curator of European painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and currently a distinguished curator and lecturer, Princeton University Art Museum.

Alex Moore, head of exhibitions and creative producer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, UK. Curator of the exhibition Unearthed, unfolding the pioneering story of botanical photography since 1840.

Yoav Rinon, professor of classical studies and comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Courtesy of the artist

Anamazon (Limb)

Pamela Rosenkranz

b. 1979, Switzerland

lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland

In her works, Pamela Rosenkranz investigates transitions from the natural to the artificial, dissolving their distinctiveness with reciprocal copying strategies. Anamazon (Limb) appears in a cacophony of sounds from the Amazon in a seemingly natural environment. Pulsating waves run through the branch as if it were an organ pumping blood through its capillaries while a sticky green fluid oozes from its wounded broken edge. The use of the phosphorous green (derived from the RGB color model) as well as the intertwining of the botanic and the organic lends the branch a futuristic character, and raises a question regarding the larger entity from which this branch or limb originates, and the possibility of chlorocruorin* running through its veins.

Like the microbiome in the human body, whose multi-branched mode of action remains largely unexplored, the myriad connections and interactions of plant and fungal systems in the Amazon, for example, are yet to be fully recognized and described. Anamazon (Limb) appears as an extraction from an ecosystem that can only exist as far as the human imagination can reach. 

* Chlorocruorin is a dichroic red-green respiratory protein, chemically similar to hemoglobin, and is only found dissolved in the blood of certain annelids.

Pamela Rosenkranz has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz; Kreuzgang Fraumünster, Zurich; GAMeC, Bergamo; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthalle Basel; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva; and the Swiss Institute, Venice, among others. She has participated in several major international group exhibitions, including the Okayama Art Summit and the 15th Biennale de Lyon. In 2015, her project Our Product was selected for the Swiss Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Courtesy of the artist, Karma International, Sprüth Magers & Miguel Abreu Gallery

Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams AR

Refik Anadol

b. 1985, Turkey

lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Refik Anadol's work is based on a series of synesthetic reality experiments centered on how human-machine collaborations can help us experience nature in a new way. The journey starts with a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on 68,986,479 million raw images of nature. Utilizing the dataset as pigment and AI as his collaborator, Anadol re-creates shapes, patterns, and colors of nature, transforming them into a hypnotic cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction of natural imagery, morphed into an AI "stream of consciousness." The work is thus based on images of nature, yet offers an alternate reality that can only be seen through a mechanical lens. As viewers gaze into the machine's mind, they are left to wonder about a future world where nature no longer exists and technology becomes the only way of remembering.

Refik Anadol is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. Preferring difference over singularity and movement over stasis, his work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Anadol's site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, encouraging viewers to rethink their engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines.

Courtesy of the artist

AG + BA (AR)

El Anatsui

b. 1944, Ghana

lives and works in Nigeria

El Anatsui's iconic bottle-cap installations are created from thousands of aluminum bottle-tops wired together with copper, thereby catalyzing the transformation of familiar, mundane objects into startlingly poetic works of art. The frugality of the materials stands in contrast to the shimmering and grandiose effect they accumulate through the artistic process and manner of installation as large-scale hanging sculptures.

For this exhibition, a two-part work has been translated to AR, inserting light movement into the flexible materials. Installed in the open space of the gardens, the work accumulates gentle movement, as if soft breezes blowing through the gardens play over its surfaces. Like many of Anatsui's pieces, the work addresses both artistic and political issues, and resonates with notions that confound art and craft, high and low, center and periphery.

Anatsui's works are held in major international collections, including The British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; de Young Museum, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Tate Modern, London; and many others. Large-scale external installations include: Ozone Layer and Yam Mound at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2010); Broken Bridge I at Musée Galliera, Paris (2012); Broken Bridge II on the High Line, New York (2012/13); and TSIATSIA – Searching for Connection (2013), his largest bottle-cap work to date. This shimmering tapestry of light embellished the façade of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, during its 245th Summer Exhibition.

Courtesy of October Gallery, London and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town, London

Biome Gateway

Timur Si-Qin

b. 1984, Germany

lives and works in New York City, USA

Timur Si-Qin's work takes form through diverse media and creates a new kind of environmental art. It challenges common notions of organic vs synthetic, natural vs cultural, human vs nonhuman, and other dualities at the heart of Western consciousness.

Si-Qin's work in the exhibition presents a temple cave that connects the biotopes and organisms of the botanical gardens to a parallel landscape. Through a portal within the temple, the viewer is invited to enter a virtual sacred locus of contemplation.

The work is part of Si-Qin's long-term meta-project New Peace – a proposal introducing a new secular faith in the face of climate change, global pandemics, and biodiversity collapse. Drawing on the concept of religions as an adaptive system of meaning for collective action, New Peace recognizes the central spiritual value of nature, and states that only through this type of deep cultural shift, the impacts of climate change may be mitigated.

Timur Si-Qin is a New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent who grew up in Berlin, Beijing, and in the American Southwest. Recent exhibitions include Von Ammon Co., Washington D.C.; Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2; the 2019 Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh; the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art; UCCA, Beidaihe; Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; The High Line, New York; and Magician Space, Beijing.

Courtesy of the artist and Société, Berlin

Gilded Cage AR

Ai Weiwei

b. 1957, China

lives and works in multiple locations, including Beijing (China), Berlin (Germany), Cambridge (UK) and Lisbon (Portugal)

Gilded Cage is an iconic work by multidisciplinary artist and activist Ai Weiwei, originally created in 2017 as part of a global migration campaign titled Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (a line taken from the 1914 poem Mending Wall by acclaimed American poet Robert Frost). Meticulously translated into the medium of AR and augmented into the different botanical gardens, this large-scale gilded cage addresses power structures, habitats, borders, confinement, and restriction, but also care giving, preservation, and nurturing. The work invites viewers to enter and walk through it, experience the different cells and turnstiles, while viewing the gardens from within, through its gilded bars, as a captured bird or an imprisoned man would.

Ai Weiwei is a multimedia artist who also works in film, writing, and social media. Major solo exhibitions include Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal ; Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon; Imperial War Museum, London; K20/K21, Düsseldorf; OCA, São Paulo; CorpArtes, Santiago; Mucem, Marseille; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Public Art Fund, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; 21er Haus, Vienna; Helsinki Art Museum; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; and Tate Modern, London.

Courtesy of the artist

Salt Stalagmite #1 [Three Bridges]

Sigalit Landau

b. 1969, Israel

lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

For over fifteen years, the Dead Sea has been a source of inspiration and a laboratory for Sigalit Landau's video works, photographic series, and salt sculptures. Relying on her unique, innovative use of Dead Sea minerals, as manifested in so many of her physical works over the years, Salt Stalagmite #1 [Three Bridges], derives from Landau's original idea of building a floating salt bridge over the Dead Sea to connect Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan. A symbol of hope and collaboration in the Middle East, this beautiful poetic utopian idea, conceived in 2010 and nourished by a wild political imagination, is yet to be realized on site. In its current AR manifestation, the work combines a tall salt stalagmite and a set of three salt bridges, offering viewers endless routes of exploration around the work and inside its hidden creeks. It touches on the notion of the bridge as a means of passage, a medium connecting people, cultures, and languages, and activating peace.

Sigalit Landau first came to international attention when she participated in Documenta X, Kassel in 1997. Over the past two decades, she has had numerous exhibitions in leading venues around the world, including KW, Berlin; MoMA, New York; the Israeli Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Courtesy of the artist

Directions (Zero)

Mohammed Kazem

b. 1969, Dubai, UAE

lives and works in Dubai, UAE

In Mohammed Kazem's monumental work, viewers are invited to pass through a large-scale figure of the number zero on which numerous geographic coordinates, representing all countries of the world, are inscribed in numeric form. The work is based on the significance of the number zero – one of the first important innovations by a Muslim scientist. The course of history was changed when Persian scholar Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi discovered the number zero and considered it a number within the field of algebra.

Originally conceived for the United Arab Emirates and the metropolitan city of Abu Dhabi, whose population is comprised of a diversity of nationalities, races, and religions, the work embodies the principle of coexistence and peace, inviting viewers to pass through it, as if starting anew from equal ground. As the day progresses, light, shadows, and reflections over the digital structure change, further enhancing the connection between the work and its natural surroundings.

Mohammed Kazem's artistic practice spans video, photography, and performance, seeking new ways of apprehending his environment and experiences. The work is informed by his training as a musician. He was a member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society and is one of the Five, an informal group of Emirati artists at the vanguard of conceptual and interdisciplinary art practice.

Kazem has participated in numerous group shows, in Abu Dhabi, New York, Gwangju, Houston, etc. In 2013 he represented the UAE at the Venice Biennale with an immersive video installation entitled Walking on Water, curated by Reem Fadda, and in 2015 he showcased works from the Tongue series at 1980 – Today, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.

Courtesy of the artist

Pneuma

Mel O'Callaghan

b. 1975, Australia

lives and works in Paris, France, and Sydney, Australia

Pneuma is an ancient Greek word for breath, spirit, or soul. Mel O'Callaghan's work interlaces these meanings and invites the viewer to not only observe the work, but also engage with it and take part in a ritual process based on breathing. Walking toward a shimmering portal, viewers cross its threshold into a sphere of increasing color, light, and sound mutations in which the sound of breathing is heard, as if penetrating it from the outside, blurring the boundaries of life and non-life, organic and inorganic. With each breath, faster and deeper, the viewer gradually attains an altered state of consciousness where the body becomes a site of revelation, transcending thresholds to see what lies beyond physical and psychological limitations. Through this work and previous breathing works, O'Callaghan explores the ways trance states can be achieved based on breathing, rhythmic sound, and altered posture. O'Callaghan's series of breath works was developed in collaboration with Sabine Rittner, Institute of Medical Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

O'Callaghan's works explore human behavior and psychology in relation to notions of resistance, endurance, and transformation. Her videos, performances, installations, and paintings depict bodies pushed to the limit. Here and in much of her work, the human body is a site of agency and resilience through which she investigates individual and collective freedom. Recent solo exhibitions include UQ Art Museum, Brisbane; Artspace, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; NGV, Melbourne; Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Center for Contemporary Arts, Prague.

Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Allen, Paris, Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney, and Galeria Belo-Galsterer, Lisbon

Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) AR

Isaac Julien CBE RA

b. 1960, UK

lives and works in London, UK

Isaac Julien's Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) draws inspiration from a letter written by Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi and was shot in Iceland's remote ice caves in the Vatnajökull region. Over five days, the crew endured sub-zero temperatures in the heart of spectacular, glistening glacial caves formed in ice over thousands of years and only accessible a few days a year due to the harsh climate.

Thus, the artwork explores themes inspired by Bo Bardi's letter, where she praises the beauty of semi-precious gems over preferred precious stones such as diamonds. Julien portrays some of the most beautiful objects as the least precious in a conventional sense. Signature elements of Bo Bardi's work have been incorporated into Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave), including a staircase built by hand into the ice cave during the production of the film. Continuing the parallels, Julien integrates Bo Bardi's trademark glass and concrete easels into his film.

Augmenting a five-screen version of Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) into the different botanical gardens lends it additional layers by juxtaposing distant and near. In doing so, ecosystems' characteristics are questioned: in their relative temperature – the cold and the warm digitally meeting – but also with regards to notions of natural and cultural, cultivated and wild.

Isaac Julien is a Turner prize-nominated artist and filmmaker; recipient of the Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award; appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017. He creates multi-screen film installations and photographs that incorporate different artistic disciplines to create a unique, poetic visual language. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at MAXXI, Rome, where Julien exhibited his series entitled A Marvellous Entanglement, and the very recent European premiere of his ten-screen installation Lessons of the Hour, at the National Galleries of Scotland (Modern One), heading the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Courtesy of the artist