New Interfaces/ Klaus Speidel: The traces we will leave behind: Landscape, Storytelling, Solastalgia and Art in a Digital World

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

In his nostalgio-analytic talk, Klaus Speidel will engage with the question of traces in the natural and digital worlds and look at how different artists have reflected the theme. His explorations will be based on his research for the exhibition « Fragile Creation », which he co-curated at the Dom Museum in Vienna (2020) as well as « Drawing after Digital » which he curated at XPO gallery in Paris (2016). He will also engage with the practices of Kristína Mičová and Michaela Rapavá, which are simultaneously exhibited at the MEDIUM Gallery. We will learn about the fundamental connection between trace-making and storytelling, which artists have reflected since Prehistory and speculate about a future where most landscapes have become traces of destructive human action, creating a sense of Solastalgia, a feeling of loss for a home we long for.

The lecture will be held in English language.

Klaus Speidel is an art critic and curator. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne, he wrote for the Centre Pompidou, the Schirn Kunsthalle, the Belvedere, mumok and Albertina in Vienna and many other European museums and galleries and curated numerous exhibitions in France and Austria. He teaches art history at Vienna University, transmedia art theory at the University for Applied Arts and Visual Narrative at Paris College of Art. He gave workshops on the art of art writing at summeracademy.at and Writing on Contemporary Creation at Ecole Estienne Paris and regularly publishes art criticism in Spike, Art Newspaper France and other online and offline publications.

Connect on instagram: @dirtytheory

The lecture is a part of the New Interfaces series, which is dramaturgically covered by the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová. The New Interfaces are a series of interdisciplinary lectures led by experts in various fields - literature, psychology, social sciences, aesthetics and game theory and art. They deal with topics that resonate in the work of the youngest artists working within the post-media environment. The cycle will focus primarily on topics related to our cognitive conditions in the interfaces of constantly evolving technologies and in contrast to the desire for authentic, visceral experience escaping out here-and-now. These themes appear in art with increasing urgency, both in the overproduction of performative works or works thematizing these new interfaces. The lectures also reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the MEDIUM gallery and its reading club for students What´s the Point?

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.