In times of increasing mass surveillance and hypervisibility – what is privacy, and how is it manifested? Has privacy become a notion of nostalgia – an exotic algorithm?
Curator Cristina Vasilescu invites artists Nora Silva, Ami Clarke and Nilz Källgren to stretch, distort and investigate contemporary notions of privacy. Three ‘installations’, or private entities, clash into a series of (non)contingent reflections, or perhaps manifestations, to build a larger sum of nonlinear order. The entirety of this project is found equally in its singularities, as in the entirety itself; an accumulative wheel of reflections, actions and objects that co-exist, and allow each other to grow in the same proximity. Voices and visibilities unfold in and around the space of tranzit.ro/București, through actions and processes that parasite and cross-contaminate each other, as well as the parameters of the space itself.
Nora Silva’s I Never Went, an undisclosed carnival, a performative installation, where privacy is manifested through mass, opens on Friday 14th September and also marks the official start of a series of activations. Sunday 16th brings a new iteration of Ami Clarke’s Low Animal Spirits, in which automated voices read out a live onscreen score containing real time data and news feeds. Nilz Källgren’s weirdos from another accumulates objects and actions through a public intervention amid the first day of install on Wednesday 12th September, continues in passive corporeality throughout the weekend and resumes to performative action on Tuesday 18th. The entirety of singularities leaves tranzit.ro/București on Wednesday 19th September.
Biographies
Cristina Vasilescu
Cristina Vasilescu is a curator based between London and Bucharest. She is part of London-based collective clearview, Event and Programme Assistant at ICA, London and the curator of forthcoming project with artist-in-residence Nora Silva –I Never Went – The death of anonymity. A carnival turned a mourning– at ODD, Bucharest among other things. Through curated projects and collaborations, alongside creative exercises, questions around public programming, collective work, invisible bodies and ‘instituent practices’ are proposed and dismantled.
Nora Silva
Nora Silva is a Spanish artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in July 2017, and recent solo shows include Hear Me Whisk at Lajuan gallery in Madrid, and Your Friendly Local, at Chalton Gallery in London. Nora manufactures contexts and builds sculptural installations as a fiction from where to address political issues. She also co-directs The Gramounce, an exhibition supper club, and MilesKm, an arts collective for the research of collaborative practices within the arts.
Ami Clarke
Ami Clarke is an artist, writer, and educator, working within the emergent behaviours that come of the complex protocols of platform capitalism, with a focus on the inter-dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. Earlier works explored how these dynamics show that participation is bought through an unacknowledged currency of data, that facilitates a granular and psychological profiling of the quantified self, via social media, that can be seen to contribute to undermine the process of democracy itself. Recent and forthcoming writing includes: ‘covfefe: language within a meme economy’, “Text as Market” Artists Re-thinking the Blockchain, “The Currency of Data” Sonic Acts journal, ‘Ami Clarke: Author of the Blank Swan’ with Elie Ayache. Her work is included in Information edited by Sarah Cook (2016) – an art-historical reassessment of information-based art and exhibition curation, from 1960s conceptualism to current digital and network-based practices – Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art and MIT press series.
She has recently exhibited/performed work at LUX in conjunction with Chelsea Space (2018), HereNow art + tech residency SPACE (2018), Xero Kline and Coma (2017), Gallery Filodrammatica, Rijeka (2017), Aksioma, Ljubljana (2017), Furtherfield gallery (2017), StudioRCA Riverlight (2016), Centrespace Dundee (2016), ICA (2016), Wysing Arts Centre (2016), Hayward Gallery (2015), Museo Del Chopo – Mexico City (2015), collaborated with Cuss Group SA – Ithuba Gallery (British Council connect_ZA) (2015), David Roberts Arts Foundation (2015), Camden Arts Centre (2015), The Container, Tokyo (2013).
Nilz Källgren
Nilz Källgren is an artist and curator based between London and Stockholm. Through curated projects and collaborations, alongside video, sculpture and writing, questions of tangibility and momentum, action and interaction are proposed and deconstructed. Objects and formats are directed to act as something other, to fully understand their inherent being and potential. Co-founder of clearview (London), former co-director of Galleri Bon (Stockholm), co-founder and curator of Revenue S:t Eriksgatan 79 (Stockholm), curator at Carl Kostyal Stockholm and editor of the art section of Bon Magazine.