SCREEN IT

Stradstriennale Hasselt Genk 5

 

October 5, 2019 – January 5 , 2020

 

Curator: Pieter Jan Valgaeren

 

 

 

Screens, screens, screens…they are ubiquitous. We check our own mobile screen up to 250 times per day. SCREEN IT focuses on the impact of our screen culture on contemporary art. Come and discover how TV, video, Internet or VR influence artists. Privacy, fake news, bitcoins or AI… never before was contemporary art so… ‘contemporary’.

 

Take the time to visit two key expositions at the Corda Campus (Hasselt) or at C-Mine (Genk) and get inspired by all the parallel events in both cities.

 

The main exhibition SCREEN IT takes place on the Corda Campus, currently one of the fast growing tech incubators in Europe. But also the former basecamp of Philips where technologic innovations as audio and videocassettes or Laservision were invented that help spreading the western visual culture over the world. The dominance of this culture, linked to the omnipresence of screens is the starting point of the exhibition. Artist as Nam June Paik or Wolf Vostell already tackled the possibilities of screens in art and culture in the ’60. Paik’s famous quote “Television tortured the intellectuals for a long time… it is about time that the intellectuals torture television” clearly presents this generation ambiguous positions towards screens. This approach can easily be transferred towards our current society filled with buzz words as big data, social media, VR or augmented reality. The exhibition thus will tackle the current status of the arts towards the cultural impact of the screen fueled culture we live in.

 

Sometimes as a source of inspiration, as a canvas or as starting point for debate, the current and future generation of artists is touching the limits of technology or the impact on contemporary art esthetics, news gathering, politics, social commitment and more. The generation of digital natives, born with their fingers clued on a screen, is investigating a world with or without screens, questioning virtual worlds and augmented realities in an intriguing way.