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DISCRETE CHANNEL WITH NOISE SHOWING IN 'CYBERNETICS NETWORKED SYSTEMS' CURATED BY DR CHRISTINA LEBER FOR THE DZBANK , FRANKFURT . JUNE 4 TO OCTOBER 18, 2025.

The exhibition “Cybernetics. Networked Systems” can be understood as an intermezzo, a cheerful scenic interlude that encapsulates the stance of the DZ BANK Art Foundation: interdisciplinary thinking and the uncovering, questioning, and analysis of connections and processes – between living beings, the arts, sciences, and technical and ecological systems. The exhibition draws on past ideas and aims to further explore impulses and connections from there.

Cybernetics is the regulation of message transmission in living beings and machines. It is about controlling complex systems that are transferred from humans to machines. It is the continuous search for common structures and communication principles, conceived in analogy to living organisms and social organizations.

The exhibition, featuring works from the DZ BANK collection, is divided into four main themes:

Perception and Language. Communication as a Complex System Humans and Computers. Communication with Machines Self-Organizing Systems. Nature and the Environment Social Systems. Seeing Oneself Through Oneself.

artists include : Heba Y. Amin, John Baldessari , Rosa Barba, Robert Barry, Jan Paul , Evers Christiane,Feser Thomas Florschuetz , Johanne Franzen , Jochen Gerz.,Timo Hinze , Zofia Kulik ,Jochen Lempert, Michaela Melián,?Olaf Metzel, Antoni Muntadas, Mehreen Murtaza, Anne & Patrick Poirier,Johannes Raimann ,Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Helmut Schweizer, Clare Strand , VALIE EXPORT and Adrian Williams

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IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY THAT EXPECTS EVERYTHING FROM YOU.

CURATED BY CHRISTIN MULLER FOR HAUNT GALLERY AS PART OF EMOP, BERLIN. 01.03.–29.03.2025

IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY THAT EXPECTS EVERYTHING FROM YOU 

Viktoria Binschtok, Elina Brotherus, Peggy Buth, Yvon Chabrowski, Louisa Clement, Marsha Cottrell, Rebekka Deubner, Jan Paul Evers, Falk Haberkorn, Esther Hovers, Paul Hutchinson, Sven Johne, Julia Kissina, Simon Lehner, Marge Monko, Simon Norfolk, Barbara Probst, Anys Reimann, Adrian Sauer, Sarah Schönfeld, Fiete Stolte, Clare Strand, Rosemarie Trockel, Marion Scemama & David Wojnarowicz 

Our present age is shaped by ideology and emotion. Digitization, climate change, and conflicts between societies and states are leading to political and social upheavals that impact individuals and the environment alike. The artists in this show reflect on experienced and anticipated processes of transformation; their carefully crafted images respond to the fast-paced visual media economy with new perspectives for facing the challenges of the early twenty-first century. How do we position ourselves in the present? What are the repercussions of social reorganization? How are urban and rural realities changing? And what is expected of us? The exhibition sheds light on these questions with photographic works by the Art’Us Collectors’ Collective, a non-profit association of private collectors committed to a lively culture of exhibition and communication.

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BUGS & METAMORPHOSIS: GLITCHING PHOTOGRAPHY

HASSELBLAD CENTER, GOTHENBURG CURATED BY LOUISE WOLTHERS AND NINA MANGALANAYAGAM

8th Feb - May 4th 2025

Bugs & Metamorphosis: Glitching Photography is an exhibition that explores "bugs" in two intriguing ways: both as technical glitches and as tiny creatures, insects. By combining these two perspectives, the exhibition creates a visual experience that’s playful, critical, and thought-provoking. From digital mishaps to insect-inspired art, the works challenge our understanding of photography and technology.

With more than 15 artworks, the exhibition reveals how glitches can disrupt and question systems of knowledge, classification, and control. Bugs appear both as real creatures—moths, flies, bees, and other insects—and as technical malfunctions with themes like swarming, webbing, symbiosis, and extinction. The exhibition highlights the ecologies between human-made and natural forces.

Bugs & Metamorphosis provides critical insights into contemporary networked and machine-based photography. Bugs emerge through hybridity, camouflage, mimicry, and transformation. Many of the artworks are grounded in decolonial, feminist, queer, and ecological practices, embracing glitching to highlight ambiguity, unruliness, and vulnerability. Other works delve into glitches within archiving, mapping, and visualization processes. Through a mix of technologies—both analogue and digital, screen-based and installation, AI/GAN, and “low-tech”—the exhibition shows how glitches can open new ways of seeing and understanding the world.

Several of the works have been created specifically for this exhibition, and many of the artists are shown in Sweden for the first time. During the exhibition, photography and videoworks by Rashaad Newsome and Amalie Smith are shown at Gothenburg Museum of Art, and at Gothenburg Museum of Natural History works by Joana Moll, Mónica Alcázar-Duarte and Kristina Lenz and Alex Klug are on display.

Participating artists: Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (ME), Taysir Batniji (PS/FR), Jake Elwes (UK), Olle Essvik (SE), Henrik Håkansson (SE), Kristina Lenz och Alex Simon Klug (DE), Nina Mangalanayagam (SE), Joana Moll (ES), Rashaad Newsome (US), Josèfa Ntjam (FR), Amalie Smith (DK), Clare Strand (UK), Hope Strickland (UK), Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert & Alexa Achilleos (CY), Sheung Yiu (HK/FI).

Curators: Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Foundation and Nina Mangalanayagam, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg

An extended public program including performances and film screenings will take place during the exhibition period. Details to follow.

Parts of the exhibition will travel to Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark, June – August 2025.

In connection with the exhibition, the book Bugs & Metamorphosis:  Field Guide to Glitching Photography will be published by Art & Theory. The book is designed as a field guide and includes an introduction by Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers, as well as essays by Cathryn Klasto, Joanna Zylinska, Majken Overgaard, Peter Nielsen, Peter Ole Pedersen, Tintin Wulia.

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PUSHING THE ENVELOPE - NATIONAL MUSEUM OF COMPUTING (TNMOC) CURATED BY LUCY HELTON. 2nd November - March 2025.

The National Museum of Computing invites you to view Pushing the Envelope: An exhibition of mailed and correspondence art, an innovative exhibition coordinated by (TNMOC') first artist-in-residence, Lucy Helton.

Pushing the Envelope: An exhibition of mailed and correspondence art showcases work made by 2D artists who either use or reference archaic technologies. As The National Museum of Computing houses the world's first electronic computer, the Colossus, which Tommy Flowers spent eleven months designing and building at the Post Office Research Station in North West London, each artwork will be posted into the Museum. The mailed artworks are to be hung through-out the galleries between, beside or over the machines themselves. While the museum’s visitors will diversify and expand the artists' audiences, the exhibition aims to introduce art to the visitors they would otherwise never see.

The exhibition features work from the following artists:

Antony Cairns

Harry Gammer-Flitcroft

Stewart Hardie

Lucy Helton

Qiana Mestrich

Sarah Pickering

Indianna Solnick

Barry Stone

Clare Strand

Rahel Zoller & Louis Porter

99g's Artist Book Cooperative and invited artists

Through technical support from Museum volunteers, Lucy and participating artists have transformed the Museum into a vehicle for artistic expression.

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THE ART BUSINESS PODCAST WITH DR DAVID BELLINGHAM AND SOTHEBYS STUDENTS.

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A BUTTERFLY AND A HORSE AT PARIS PHOTO ON PARROTTA GALLERY BOOTH A48 AND CONVERSATION PANEL.

Presenting new work from The Butterfly and a Horse Series and talking on the Conversations panel "Collecting the Photographic – Current and Future Practices", Alongside Viktoria Binschtok, and Hanako Murakami, with Nadine Wietlisbach as chair.

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LANDSKRONA FOTO :CLARE STRAND SELECTED WORKS 2005-2022

6th September-3rd November 2024.

Over the past 25 years, British artist Clare Strand has established herself as a significant and influential figure in contemporary art, known for her often unconventional approach to photography. Specially curated for the Landskrona Foto Festival, we are showing selected works at Landskrona Museum. Strand’s work has been exhibited widely, and she continues to be a prominent voice in discussions about the future of photography.

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A BUTTERFLY AND HORSE - A PUBLIC THREE-DAY EVENT WITH SOTHEBY INSTITUTE AND V&A MUSEUM.

19-21st September 2024.

A Butterfly and a Horse by Clare Strand is a participatory monument to the complex relationship between the analogue, the networked, the digital and the generated image. This new work commissioned by MA students at Sotheby’s Institute of Art opens for the Digital Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Inspired by the early image transfer experiments by Shelford Bidwell, a pioneer of modern digital technology, this work explores how the creation, profusion, and circulation of images have a significant impact on our experience of time, memory, and identity.

The work consists of a recreated darkroom, incorporating Strand’s own (and longtime unused) enlarger, which visitors will be invited to use to manually expose a photograph of either a horse or a butterfly, making reference to the first two images which Bidwell attempted to digitally transfer in 1880.

Although photography was originally considered the most scientifically accurate instrument capable of capturing reality, even the earliest pioneers recognized its potential for misinformation and the ‘hoax.’ It is now clear that photographic images can also pervert reality, especially considering recent developments in digital technology such as generative AI software. Far from Roland Barthes’ idea of the photographic image as an index of the ‘having-been-there’ of a precise moment in the past, digital technology has completely changed the prospects of the medium, manifesting in several respects as an oversaturation and deluge of images. It is precisely the phenomenon of the constant presence and rapid exchange of images in our daily lives, particularly through social media, that causes fundamental confusion and disorientation. This potentially leads to the draining of value from images themselves and even a distortion of the memory they carry. Paradoxically, the mere act of capturing what stands before us through the lenses of a smartphone or a digital camera to preserve a memory can lead to the oblivion of that very memory. It is as if digitising memory can somehow eradicate actual memory. Instead, we insist on the implicit mediating effect that photography has, as it is not a neutral instrument, but tends to frame reality through the photographer’s eye. Photographs epitomise the irreversible passage of time, inevitably interposing a distance between what has been captured by the camera and its viewers, like monuments which frequently claim to bear remembrance of the past but are necessarily detached from the present.

While monuments traditionally occupy public space and typically glorify certain individuals or values belonging to the past, the Reimagining the Monument team proposes a different concept of what monuments can be. Contrary to the traditional view, we emphasize that memory is inherently subjective, shaped by each person's unique experiences, personality, and identity. Rather than considering the function of memory as exercised simply through the visualisation of images, we must also consider that often identities are expressed through images, particularly via social media, as they are able to stage certain scenarios, which further suggests that memory is inherently subjective.

Erving Goffman in his seminal text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), theorised the so-called “dramaturgical analysis” of social interaction, arguing that individuals behave like actors on a stage, perform their own identity to a public of social peers, and present themselves as they want to be perceived. In the context of social media, we could talk about a digital presentation of the self, in which individuals present or post their identity mainly through image sharing, contributing to the empowering of digital memory and building a data set that will be kept as reference by platforms operated by algorithms. The digital self would only function as a mere simulacrum of the real individual, inevitably blurring the boundaries between the virtual and real, creating a hybrid reality.

In this context, we might ask ourselves what the role of a monument is in our current society. Is it still a useful instrument to crystallise the past and preserve its memory, or does it risk standing as a mute symbol of something irremediably forgotten in our epoch, exclusively oriented to the hic et nunc dimension?

Strand’s work responds to these questions by conceiving a type of non-monument to the very idea of image creation and transference, focusing on the analogue photographic process and rejecting the modern thirst for immediate satisfaction by delaying the completion of the developing process of the photographs. People engaging with the monument will indeed receive their final photographs in the post weeks after exposing the negatives at the V&A.

In this sense, Strand’s own approach to the photographic medium, which she deliberately affirms to work ‘against’, is emblematic of the issues raised by digitalization. Shifting away from an essentially analogue practice, the artist has focused her approach on the intersection between the electronic and digital world, with its algorithms and generative tools as photographic lenses, resulting in an interesting exploration of the role of chance in the disoriented world we live in.

It is crucial to note that Strand’s monument also directly addresses the perennial issue of photography’s veridicity, as the images of a butterfly and a horse used for creating the negatives will be generated by an AI program trained on her own back catalogue of work. The two images offered are ‘memories’ of images, delivered in Strand’s own personal style, even though the animals depicted never existed and the photographs were never physically taken.

Finally, the very images produced by the people visiting the monument will be posted on a Butterfly and a Horse Instagram page, also showing the context in which every visitor framed them, and highlighting how digital image-sharing has become an important instrument to express identity. Thus, the participatory element of the installation will encourage visitors to focus on their own personal experience of images, shifting the paradigm of the monument from the public sphere to a more intimate and personal one, addressing the fragmentation present in modern society and the inescapable subjectivity of memory.

Alessandro Manetti, MA Contemporary Art '24 Sandra Nikusev, MA Art Business '24

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HAROLD JONES AND FRANCES MURRAY RESEARCH FELLOW AT CCP TUCSON ARIZONA.

Very pleased to be awarded the Harold Jones and Frances Murray Research Fellowship. I shall be researching in the CCP archive in June 2024!

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'ALL THAT HOOPLA' SHOWING IN INTERVENTIONS AT BUNDESKUNSTHALLE, BONN, GERMANY. 1 MAY TO 27TH OCTOBER 2024

With Interactions 2024, we once again invite you to spend the summer in the public outdoor and indoor spaces of the Bundeskunsthalle. "Clare Strand’s fun fair stand All that Hoopla is a playful reflection on the mechanisms of the art market".

"All the works demonstrate that art can be an open offer, serving both individual and shared experiences – a togetherness in which rigid roles and behaviours are questioned and openness, tolerance and sensitivity are encouraged. All the participating artists are interested in forms of expression and techniques that reduce the possible distance to art, as well as the distance within a complex, diverse society"

All that Hoopla film

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HSBI INTERNATIONAL WEEK 2024

lecture and workshop with students from Hochschule Bielefeld - University of Applied Sciences and Arts at the invitation of Adrain Sauer.

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SKIRTS SHOWING AT KUNSTMUSEUM BONN

25.04.2024 – 25.08.2024

Until August 25, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is exhibiting an overview of the new additions to its collection. On display are paintings, photographs and sculptures that provide an insight into the Kunstmuseum’s current collection focuses and developments.

With works by

Natalie Czech, Helmut Dorner, Bogomir Ecker, Robert Elfgen, Gregor Gleiwitz, Vivian Greven, Anna Lehmann-Brauns, C. O. Paeffgen, Stephanie Pech, Thomas Scheibitz, Corinna Schnitt, Clare Strand

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FROM HERE ON OUT A CRITICAL REVIEW. KUNSTSTIFTUNG DZ BANK. February 15- 15 June 2024.

Photo-like images on the World Wide Web and on all digital devices mean that “photography” is once again on everyone’s lips. Do these data-based images have anything to do with drawing with light?We take this question as an opportunity to take stock and look at the history of the development of photography. What is photography?

Art foundation DZ bank "From here. An inventory Photo-like images on the World Wide Web and on all digital devices mean that “photography” is once again on everyone’s lips. Do these data-based images have anything to do with drawing with light?

We take this question as an opportunity to take stock and look at the history of the development of photography. What is photography? For the exhibition »From Here. “An Inventory” brings together 20 artists whose works demonstrate the experimental spectrum that photography has brought about as an artistic genre. The audience can expect a fascinating compilation that ranges from the idea of the Platonic allegory of the cave to digital image creation and includes photographic images from various techniques as well as reliefs, sculptures and films.

Eine Ausstellung mit Werken von:  Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishivili, Viktoria Binschtok, Miriam Böhm, Katarína Dubovská, Christiane Feser, Philipp Goldbach, Beate Gütschow, Gottfried Jäger, Isabelle Le Minh, Peter Miller, Conrad Müller, Johannes Raimann, Timm Rautert, Adrian Sauer, Stefanie Seutert, Clare Strand, Sophie Thun, Ulay, Valter Ventura und Oriol Vilanova

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AWARE: ARCHIVES OF WOMEN ARTISTS, RESEARCH AND EXHIBITIONS, ASSOCIATION LOI 1901 WEBSITE.

I am very happy to be entered into the AWARE Archive co-founded in 2014, directed by Camille Morineau, curator and art historian, specialising in women artists. Biography text by Orit Gat.

“The primary ambition of AWARE is to rewrite the history of art on an equal footing. Placing women on the same level as their male counterparts and making their works known is long overdue.”

Since its creation in 2014, AWARE has worked to make women* artists of the 19th and 20th Century visible by producing and posting free bilingual (French/English) content about their work on its website. The biographies published online largely originate from the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (Universal dictionary of female creators), published in 2013 thanks to a partnership with the Éditions des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque. This website’s database brings together women artists born between 1790 and 1972 working in visual arts, with no limitations on medium or country. The partnerships developed with museums, universities and art historians, as well as with sponsors and cultural events in France and abroad have contributed to the development of AWARE’s online database, updated weekly with new artist profiles and research articles.

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SIZE MATTERS. SCALE IN PHOTOGRAPHY. Kunstpalast, Berlin Group Show. 31st Jan 2024.

"Everything changes in an image when the zoom slider is adjusted: certain things are highlighted, detached from their context, exaggerated or reinterpreted. They move closer to us, allowing us to study them, or blur before our eyes"

The scale of a pictorial subject or image format harbours great creative possibilities – but also the potential for manipulation. For the first time, an exhibition comprehensively examines the considerable yet often subtle shifts in meaning that accompany changes in size in photography. Works from the late nineteenth century to the present day raise questions about how scale affects our perception and handling of photographic images.

Photography can change its dimensions more easily than any other medium; pictures can be effortlessly blown up into large images on museum walls and billboards, or shrunk down to a thumbnail on a mobile phone screen. While photography traditionally reproduces the world in miniature, it can also present things in a life-size or even larger-than-life-size format and render the invisible visible.

“While painters have to determine the size of their canvas before applying the first brushstroke, photography is a medium without fixed measurements at the moment of its creation when the shutter is released. It is only afterwards that a decision is made about whether an image will materialise and, if so, in what dimensions,” explains Felix Krämer, general director of the Kunstpalast. “A defining and unique feature of photography is that size is a mutable quality, which is something we want to highlight with this exhibition.”

Bernd und Hilla Becher, Kristleifur Björnsson, Karl Blossfeldt, Georg Böttger, Katt Both, Renata Bracksieck, Natalie Czech, Jan Dibbets, Josef Maria Eder und Eduard Valenta, Leonard Elfert, Claudia Fährenkemper, Hanna Josing, Alex Grein, Andreas Gursky, Franz Hanfstaengl, Erik Kessels, Heinrich Koch, Jochen Lempert, Rosa Menkman, Duane Michals, Joanna Nencek, Floris M. Neusüss, Georg Pahl, Trevor Paglen, W. Paulcker, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Timm Rautert, Amanda Ross-Ho, Evan Roth, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Adrian Sauer, Morgaine Schäfer, Hugo Schmölz, Karl-Hugo Schmölz, Katharina Sieverding, Kathrin Sonntag, Lucia Sotnikova, Simon Starling, Clare Strand, Carl Strüwe, Andrzej Steinbach, Julius Stinde, Anna Stüdeli, Wolfgang Tillmans, Moritz Wegwerth, René Zuber

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THE COLDER THE WEATHER THE WARMER THE HEARTS

"The Colder the Weather the Warmer the Hearts catwalk event is a vehicle to combine both the past and present, within a community setting as well as a conceptual act of physically activating photographic archives in a bold and unique way."

Click link to see film

2023 I was invited by NOUA and Curator Alexander Mourant to make work in response to the Arkiv in Nordland, with the kind support of archivist Espen Kjelling. After researching the Archive I learnt of a community fashion show hosted in the NOUA building in 1953 which showcased the latest Bodo fashion worn by 7 models. This led me to propose a new event that would bring together fashion, the community of Bodo, NOUA’s past and present and the Nordland Photographic Archive.

Artists are often embedded into communities to make 'art'. My ambition was not to teach the people of Bodo about their own culture and history but to think about archives and how they can be activated and accessed in new and exciting ways.

Sitting in Espen Kjelling's office looking through the mass of imagery, I selected photographs that felt both historical and personal, from the portrait of a young Evy Landsholm to the images of the bombed landscape of wartime Bodo.

I initiated an open call asking for 7 volunteers ( as in the original fashion show) to model a photographic outfit and to walk a catwalk in the NOUA building. I was contacted by exactly 7 participants who ranged between the ages of 45 and 85 years. The number 7 (an important number for me) prevailed through the entire project, 7 models, 7 images of the 1953 models on the walls, 7 boards on the catwalk stage, 7 outfits and 7 pairs of shoes...

The photographic outfits were produced in the UK catering to the chest, waist and hip measurements of each model. Through conversation, I learnt the biographies of each participant, all of whom had diverse, intriguing, impressive and unique stories to tell. We met, mostly for the first time in person just 3 days before the event and with trepidation, I presented their outfits. The potential for failure was high but placing trust in happenstance ( a motif of my practice) all of the dresses fitted and we quickly became a team, where new friendships and trust formed.

On the 23rd of September, the 7 models took to the catwalk supported by a sizeable and excited audience. I introduced each model with a small biography and an explanation of each wearable photograph by date, author and description. The background music 'Dream Operator' by David Byrne was carefully chosen, referencing the epic catwalk in his film ' True Stories', a tale of a small town coming together to celebrate the 'specialness' of its community.

The Colder the Weather the Warmer the Hearts catwalk event is a vehicle to combine both the past and present, within a community setting as well as a conceptual act of physically activating photographic archives in a bold and unique way. After the event, NOUA offered Wafflecakes and drinks and the audience ate, drank and danced to the band. The clothes were then left to hang in the space along with this film of the event.

Thank you to Alexander Mourant for his unfailing support, to NOUA for their generous hosting and openness to ideas, to Espen Kjelling and the Arkiv In Nordland, to Dan Marnier for the filming and last but no means least to my models, Sissel, Kate, Ann Christin, Ellen, Ella, Lilli and Hege.

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THE COLDER THE WEATHER THE WARMER THE HEART -Noua Gallery 23rd September - 15th November. Bodo Norway.

NOUA invites Bodø's residents to celebrate the collaboration between the artist and the local Bodø community through the opening event on Saturday 23 September at 1pm.

In the exhibition, The Colder the Weather the Warmer the Hearts, Clare Strand will debut her latest wearable artworks through a fashion catwalk in the gallery. At the opening, there will be a catwalk with seven Bodø-based models, (aged between 45-85yrs) live music and serving of refreshments and waffles - reflecting the original event in 1953.

With inspiration from archive photos from a fashion show organized in the Godtemplarhuset in Bodø (NŌUA) in 1953, Clare's artwork will depict a number of stories connected to Bodø. Strand has a particular interest in photographic clothing .She will present 7 outfits designed by using images from the photographic collection of the Archives in Nordland.

Curator: Alexander Mourant Essay