Multimedia Installation. Simultaneously installed at La Beque Artists Residency (Switzerland) & Bass & Reiner (San Francisco), 2021
Piercing the Curtain features works produced by Bruno Aeberli and Rhonda Holberton as part of an experimental curatorial project, Binominale, in which artist pairs from different countries exchange instructions on how to recreate or re-perform each other’s artworks 0. The works evolved over a 4 month period of remote correspondence between the two artists. The conversations began the way many do in the post-COVID environment, over Zoom and amid the Summer 2021 fires in San Francisco and the Flooding in Europe. Within these specific conditions a loci began to emerge; the material manifestations of digital signals; with special focus on phenomenology of climate change, infrastructural entanglement, and the tension between the perceptions of a seamlessly networked globalized planet, and the stark differences of the human experiences across borders of all kinds.
The exhibition title nods to a 1995 conference, “Piercing the Curtain: Corona and the Revolution in Intelligence,” about the US’s first photo-reconnaissance satellite program. This panel deals with the imagery from the satellites – who has it, who will have it, its uses, etc. Both artists in this exhibition consider digital identity, networks, labor, and material manifestations of digital signals. The works circumscribe the physical realization of digital apparitions using language as technology; allowing utterance to conjure and manifest.
