Taking ZKM as a site of inquiry, Theodoulos Polyviou's and Eleni Diana Elia's VR site-specific installation becomes a place where ritual, ideology and architecture are shifted to reflect the non-religious, the sexual, and the everyday in conversation with the ideological architecture of the museum itself.
The symbolic and material boundaries of the museum are being renegotiated inviting viewers to find new ways to compromise within these reconfigured spaces. The silmultaneous use of the pair of headsets allows users to encounter each other and engage in body-less drifting challenging notions of presence and embodiment.
Using a code the artists have developed in collaboration with David Kaskel (founder of Breaking Fourth in London), the physical boundaries of the space will be calibrated to meet the virtual ones seen through the VR headsets, making ones experience of the installation immersive and tangible.
Others may experience the work not through the VR headsets but through the intimacy and voyeurism of watching the visitors in the first group experiencing the virtual world. The floorplan which is vinyl print on the ground, it indicates the boundaries of the space seen in the VR world.
Theodoulos Polyviou and Eleni Diana Elia are currently artists-in-residence at the ZKM | Hertz-Lab. They were invited in the framework of the cooperation project Beyond Matter.
The online platform »Fantastic Confabulations« will be launched on 08.04.2021 and presents virtual exhibitions until the remaining duration of the Beyond Matter project
»Fantastic Confabulations« is an online platform for virtual, yet spatial exhibitions based on architectural motifs of the building, currently occupied by ZKM | Karlsruhe. The platform is essentially a lab, that aims to generate new modes of spatial and narratological production in regards to exhibition making and production of space.
The platform, in line with the research endeavor of its host project »Beyond Matter« that inquires the virtual condition in the visual arts, investigates the relevance of art and architecture in a digital era and the ways in which their predicated relationship can challenge the conception of borders, boundaries and the ergonomic factors concerning space to become tools for political disorganization, procuring modes of queering that disrupt homogeneous normativity.
- Website
- Visit the online platform
- Credits
- Theodoulos Polyviou (Concept)
- Eleni Diana Elia (Concept)
- Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (Curator)
- Exhibitions team
Felix Koberstein: Curatorial Assistant
Manfred Hauffen: Technical Manager- Organization / Institution
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
