The Edge of the Real

Curator Anni Cheng presents an installation of moving image works by six artists, each asking questions about how we orientate ourselves in virtual worlds.

Curator

I was born in China where I first studied Landscape Design at Anhui Jianzhu University. I am now based in the UK and my curatorial research is focused on artists working with digital art, data and artificial intelligence. As part of my Curation MA at University of Exeter, I undertook an internship project with daata.art, an international online gallery for discovering, streaming and collecting digital artworks.

Artist

Diana Lynn Vandermeulen

Eva Papamargariti (born 1987, Greece) graduated from the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly with a Diploma in Architecture (2012). She holds a Master Degree in Visual Communication Design from Royal College of Art, London (2016). Her practice focuses on time-based media but also printed material and sculptural installations that explore the relationship between digital space and material reality.

Her work delves into issues and themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual, the constant diffusion of fabricated synthetic images that define and fragment our identity and everyday experience, the symbiotic procedures and entanglement that take place between humans, nature and technology.

She has exhibited her work internationally in institutions and festivals including New Museum (New York), Whitney Museum (New York), Tate Britain (London), MAAT Museum (Lisbon), Museum of Moving Image (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Athens Biennale (Athens), Thessaloniki Biennale (Thessaloniki), Transmediale Festival (Berlin).

Sabrina Ratté

Educated as a painter, Couillard is a self-taught new media artist who has made numerous well-received and internationally exhibited video, virtual reality, and video game works, accompanied by installations, paintings, and ephemera. His works often deploy humorous narratives about future dystopias to explore what motivates us as humans to work, live, and create.

Jeremy Couillard was born in 1980 in Michigan. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his BA from Michigan State University. Couillard has exhibited at Zabludowicz Collection (London, U.K.), Phillips Auction House (co-commissioned by daata editions) (New York, NY), yours, mine & ours gallery (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Louis B. James (New York, NY), Zhulong Gallery (Dallas, TX), Flux Factory (Queens, NY), and has screened his work at the New Museum and Rhizome (New York, NY), Salon 94 (New York, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA).

Couillard’s work has been featured or reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Frieze Magazine, Art in America, VICE’s The Creators Project, The Washington Post, FAD, artnet news, ARTNews, the Huffington Post, and the Observer. Couillard’s work is in important collections including the Zabludowicz Collection.

Chris Dorland

The work of visual artist Anna Sophie de Vries consists of fiction films, drawings, music, and installations. Her work shows a world in which figures are looking for a more spirited reality than the reality they live in. Bored by world cities where decadence and materialism prevail, they look for a reality that pays more attention to immaterial matters. Characters travel through dimensions in which the infinite possibilities of the extensibility of consciousness are their main motive.

Anna Sophie de Vries studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam between 2016-2018. Her work has been shown at Art Rotterdam, Stroom Den Haag and Gachang Art Studio (South Korea).

We each feel our own existence, perceiving the outside world through our flesh. We conﬁrm our existence in the presence of others. However, within the multiverse – the entirety of space, time, matter, energy and information – individual experience is very small. Physicists propose that the multiverse is made up of eleven different dimensions, including seven spatial dimensions that we cannot feel, but that nevertheless exist. As we spend more of our time in virtual space, we might begin to wonder: which dimension are we perceiving? Which is the real world – the world of consciousness or the world of the body? Where do we feel the edge of the real?

In this exhibition, both dystopia and utopia exist at the same time, but in different dimensions: The Edge of the Real begins in Eva Papamargariti’s Acedia, and the more-than-human utopia of Diana Lynn Vandermeulen’s The Gate, before arriving, disembodied, in the architecture of Sabrina Ratté’s Undream. En route, it passes through Anna Sophie de Vries’ Transferia, Chris Dorland’s untitled (cloudflare) and Jeremy Couillard’s Voluntary Associations. In eleven dimensions, these worlds all exist. This is just one route through.

The Edge of The Real is presented in partnership with Daata, an international online gallery for discovering and collecting digital artworks, who are streaming this selection of artists’ work as a playlist on daata.art

Works by Dorland, Ratté and Vandermeulen are presented courtesy of the artists and Sky Fine Foods.