Sunday 30 August 2009

Flexible Aura



Flexible Aura
15 October – 1 November 2009

Brain Factory
1-6 Tongui-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Curated by Hyunjoo Byeon and Christine Takengny
Supported by 





Given the profound changes from industrialism to mass media explosion, to information economies and globalisation, the technologies that have been developed to create and curate art have changed rapidly in the last decades. Art and its expressions have never been separated from the technologies of their time. In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin argues that technical reproducibility undermines the authority of the original and that, since the early 20th Century, the exclusive experience of an artwork’s unique aura in the place where it happens to be has been replaced by a collective experience of mass reproducible art. Quoting its title from Benjamin’s essay, the exhibition Flexible Aura would like to raise questions around the notion of the aura and the experience of art again in the age of digital reproduction where limitless global communication and image distribution is possible via digital technologies and the World Wide Web.


The participating artists Kristoffer Akselbo, Tasha Aulls, Supercream/Catherine Borra, Goldin+Senneby, Tina Hage, Niina Hartikainen, Candida Höfer, Jee Oh and Bona Park connect through their common desire to challenge archaic notions of space, originality and authentic authorship by exploring the boundaries between original and copy and subverting the authority of an artwork’s so called aura by using new technologies and new channels of dissemination beyond the dominant culture. The artworks in the exhibition reveal that the authority of the original and the experience of a unique aura in a single place are being replaced today by the idea that a work of art has flexible auras that are accessible in multiple places and can exist in manifold formations, be it in the physical or in the virtual space and that can be translated and transformed from one place to another, from one cultural setting to another.


The exhibition Flexible Aura also mirrors how today’s global curatorial practices and politics of representations are deeply interweaved into the channels of digital communication. The curators of Flexible Aura – one of them based in Seoul, the other one in London – appropriate the Internet as a tool to curate the exhibition. By employing the given situation of spatial distance as the curatorial methodology, the collaborative project was created over the course of 9 months merely on the basis of e-mail communication and JPEG images of art works that the two exhibition makers sent to each other.


By infusing physical realities with virtual spaces in the setting of the gallery, Flexible Aura furthermore questions what today can be defined as an exhibition. It explores how new technologies have shaped and renewed the perception of art and reflects how this new experience has emancipated the viewer beyond the boundaries of a gallery.

 





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