The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery is currently running its first-ever virtual exhibition, inviting a new perspective on virtual and screen-based contemporary art, of particular relevance during COVID-19. ‘Not in, of, along, or relating to a line’ is a virtual exhibition showcasing the ways in which our lives, ever revolving around technology, have changed – for better or for worse.
The curators commissioned a series of new artworks specifically for the mobile phone format, from globally acclaimed artists, with a wholly new web platform developed for this presentation. In this exhibition of “born digital” work, artists make visible both the restrictions and the freedoms that a digital landscape offers.
The Art Gallery’s Executive Director, Maya Allison, describes a mysterious fourth new commission, “like other museums and galleries, we are proud to present a virtual tour of our physical space, where Maryam Al Hamra has curated an exhibition of sculptures from a museum in an alternate reality.”
Artists exhibiting include: Addie Wagenknecht, Cao Fei, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lee Blalock, Maryam Al Hamra, micha cárdenas, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, Sophia Al-Maria and Zach Blas.
In this exhibition, nine artists and art collectives employ technology for self-expression and self-fashioning. In making visible both the restrictions and the freedoms of digital culture, they explore how identities and histories are created, transformed, or invented – and how it has become an integral part of our lives. For some, technology is a means to an end, to achieve goals that are personal: a memoir, a fictional history, or an intimate view of a person’s life.
Other artists interrogate the power relations of these same tools, from virtual gaming and ‘big data’ consumer portraits to facial recognition software. These artists appropriate technologies to narrate, alter, augment, or invent their identities and histories. The idea of individual context, of experiential relativity, threads together the works in this exhibition, and structures its form and its content.
For more information, please see: https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/our-exhibitions/main-gallery/not-a-line/
