KW Digital: The Last Museum

30 April – 6 June 21

Artists: Nora Al-Badri, Nicole Foreshew, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Zohra Opoku, Charles Stankievech

The Last Museum simultaneously unfolds across six continents and the virtual realm. Principally accessed through www.kw-berlin.de/thelastmuseum, the exhibition features all-new commissions that blur the line between cinema and sculpture, while exploring the potential of web-site-specificity.

The Last Museum’s site is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘stack’. This stack encompasses land, sculpture, code-user experience, metadata and still more softer specificities. In this respect, each artwork is a vector that intersects with the web-site’s various layers. Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at a physical site of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communications infrastructure. Final locations ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric resources for connectivity. They included a notorious hacker space in Berlin, Indigenous land in rural Australia, a popular electronics mall in downtown São Paulo, a Cosmic Ray Research Station in the Rocky Mountains, a half-built mortuary in Accra, Ghana, and burning fields in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists and the resulting clips were handed over to a coder, before being brought together by a digital way-finding protocol. The outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. At times, these tools amount to additional (digital) artworks.

Zohra Opoku and Nora Al-Badri deploy sign systems that were once undecipherable (in the form of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics). Charles Stankievech (in addition to Al-Badri) also makes use of Mesopotamian Cuneiform. Closer to home, The Wiradjuri artist Nicole Foreshew highlights Indigenous communications that resist the colonial gaze—through her work with ‘message sticks’. The Last Museum imagines information transmission across the historical longue durée, dramatizing points of intersection with emerging technologies, (body) politics, and the global economy. As it does so, a leitmotif of displacement, limbo, loss, and undeath plays out.

The Last Museum will tour as a ‘pop-up exhibition’ on partner institution’s websites. Each touring iteration will acquire a new chapter—with an additional artist/site from the host institution’s country added to the navigable sequence. The Last Museum is hosted by Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative (PCAI) website from September 14 to October 16, 2021. Additional partners will be announced in due course.

Curator: Nadim Samman

Part of project: KW Digital Program

KW Institute for Contemporary Art sits at the intersection of virtual and material worlds, and the creative use of emerging technologies. We understand that the digital is not just online or onscreen—but increasingly conditions analog or ‘real’ space. For this reason, we consider the continuum between digital and physical domains to be a key issue in contemporary culture. Exploring, criticizing, or reinventing it through art is in the public interest.

The KW Digital Program showcased cutting-edge developments in line with this vision. The program did not place the virtual in a subordinate role to the physical (or vice versa). As everyday life becomes more saturated with tech, one’s experience straddles both. Addressing this condition, our program played out across various platforms—rather than being proprietary to any particular device or location.

Throughout, we trained a close eye on the relationship between culture and innovation. We were guided by dialogue with artists and scholars. We also pursued meaningful engagement with the tech sector—to better discover the implications of applied science, and intellectual frameworks for the future.

The program was curated by Dr. Nadim Samman, Curator Digital Sphere at KW.

Overview
2021–2024

KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
2023–2024

KW Digital:
Poetics of Encryption
17 February – 26 May 2024

Poetics of Encryption
Conference
27/28 October 23

Poetics of Encryption
Book launch
28 April 23

KW on location:
Rachel Rossin
THE MAW OF
15–18 September 22
Tieranatomisches­ Theater

Open Secret
16 July – 31 December 21

The Last Museum
30 April – 6 June 21