The Curse of Smooth Operations at Steenweg

IMPAKT Festival 2022 exhibition

2 November 2022
— 30 December 2022

12:00 — 17:00

Location: Steenweg 26

€7,5 (regular) / €6 (discount CJP, Upas, Student, <18)

Opening times:
Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00 – 17:00

We are closed on 24 and 25 December

Tickets

With artworks by Marc Bauer, Anita Di Bianco and Vincent Graf.

This second exhibition of The Curse of Smooth Operations brings Anita Di Bianco’s installation Corrections and Clarifications, specially commissioned for the IMPAKT Festival 2022, in dialogue with a wall drawing by Marc Bauer created on-site for The Curse of Smooth Operations and a drawn animation film by Vincent Graf.

Corrections and Clarifications is an ongoing publication, launched in response to the glut of news reporting following 11 September 2001 — an annual edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print, online, and radio news. Each issue is a reverse-chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration, a distillation of predictive patterns and algorithmic amplifications spanning from the initial deployments of the term “fake news” to the current reckoning with the attention economy.

For The Curse of Smooth Operations Di Bianco produces a new edition of the Corrections looking at press in Dutch and English. On 6 November 2022, Matter of Divergence, a performative reading by Alena Alexandrova, will be hosted at Steenweg 26. Two additional events on 29 November and 1 December 2022: What’s in a Word? Notes on Feminist Publishing, a talk with Delphine Bedel and Memories of Displacement a screening with short films by Adnan Softić, Eliane Esther Bots, Zacharias Zitouni and Aylin Kuryel, relate to Di Bianco’s examination of today’s totalizing information landscape and (online) media culture.

Disavowing any claim to completeness, methodological accuracy or objectivity, Marc Bauer’s wall drawing synthesises collected imagery into vivid narratives in which historical and fictional elements and events from different contexts and times are layered, subverted and intertwined. History, memory, identity and gender, migration and the connections between violence, religion and sexuality play across his works ranging from large-scale wall drawings to animation films and works on paper.

Vincent Graf’s six-minutes animation 22.11.18, drawn with charcoal on a single sheet of paper, depicts a sequence of news images which were published on 22 November 2018 in various Swiss newspapers. The images appear and are erased, leaving signs and traces, one image replacing another, each pencil and eraser stroke bring closer the visible and inevitable disintegration of the paper underneath the drawings.

WEEKLY EXHIBITION TOURS

All tours start at IMPAKT (Lange Nieuwstraat 4) and end at the second exhibition location in an empty retail shop at Steenweg 26.
Are you a member of We Are Public? With your membership you can join the tours for free! Log in on the website of We Are Public to see how to get your free ticket.

Join the tours

Saturday 19 November | 14:00 | Tour in English | Join this tour
Saturday 26 November 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
Saturday 3 December 2022 | 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
Saturday 10 December | 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
Saturday 17 December | 14:00 | Tour in English | (TOUR CANCELLED)
Saturday 7 January | 14:00 | Tour in the presence of artist Zachary Formwalt | Join this tour

Anita Di Bianco Marc Bauer Vincent Graf

Anita Di Bianco

― Artist

Anita Di Bianco’s (United States) works in film, video and print have been shown at PS1, Kunstwerke, Kunsthaus Zürich, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Kunstverein Braunschweig, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, K21 in Dusseldorf, Kunstverein Salzburg, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow International, and Waterside Project Space in London. Di Bianco was educated at the SUNY-Purchase Center for Editions, earning an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, with postgraduate study at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (NL). She has lived and worked in Germany since 2007, following an initial year-long residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She lives in Frankfurt am Main. Texts and film clips at anitadi.net

Marc Bauer

― Artist

Marc Bauer (1975, Geneva) lives and works in Zurich. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Visuels Genève (now HEAD) and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He is tenured lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He has shown his works in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, notably at the Berlinische Galerie (2020-2021), Istituto Svizzero, Milan (2020), Drawing Room, London (2019), Museum Folkwang, Essen (2014), Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2013), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2011), MAMCO, Geneva (2010). And many group exhibitions, for example in the Congo Biennale (2022), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2021), Migros Museum, Zurich (2019), Kunsthaus Zurich (2019), Biennale of Sydney (2018), S.M.A.K., Ghent (2015), Albertina Museum, Vienna (2015), Liverpool Biennial (2014).

Vincent Graf

― Artist

Vincent Graf lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. One of his areas of interest is the circulation of images in analogue and digital media, including the press and Google’s image search. These media often suggest that the vast amounts of images they provide offer a comprehensive picture of the world, and that news can give a precise insight into a situation. Working mostly with time-based techniques, Graf observes both the mechanisms of image selection and presentation in these media and the images themselves. He tries to find out where these claims fail and where unintended narratives and connections emerge.

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