SOMA TOPIKA
Alison Yip
Exhibition: 15.09 – 17.10.2021
Opening: 15.09, 18 -21
Group Show, Manuel Gnam, Confinement, Zürich 2021
Interview with Manuel Gnam
Meghan Rolvien
At first, every landscape presents itself as immensely chaotic. Your maps question territorial realities and present a certain geographical ambiguity. Place descriptions suggest a connection between land and emotion.
Have you ever been to Lake Gullible?
Manuel Gnam
I’ve seen it but honestly, it’s not worth going to. It’s situated somewhere between Comfort Beach and Identity Delta. I try to draw maps of how I think tech companies organize people: making profiles according to their preferences, their physical and emotional states, and their sociologies instead of more classical cartographic signifiers like country of origin. Old maps feel like ancient tribes to me, whereas these new ones are based on broader categories of how individuals identify. And because the tools of tech companies amplify the belief systems of the individual and target their prejudices, many people end up feeling more at home in online worlds that respond to them rather than the places where they live.
From a technology point of view, people are just target demo(geo)graphics. So, who do I want to show my content to?
People who are on the left, or dog owners, or vegetarians, or people who are, well, gullible?
Click here for full interview
Galerie Noah Klink presents a series of new paintings by Manuel Gnam (b. 1982).
This body of work deals with a popular aesthetic on the internet – namely of digitally rendered animals that have been employed to attract the attention of viewers on video platforms. Potentially authored by algorithmic agents, Gnam uses these machine-generated compositions to create psychedelic paintings that resemble a new liminal reality between the virtual and the actual.
Josefne Reisch – Solo Presentation at LISTE Art Fair, Basel 2019
Josefine Reisch works through representational mediums such as trompl‘oeil painting, portraiture and textile.
Her works are based on an omnipresent and accessible European cultural heritage. She examines historical contents to outline hierarchies particularly social conditioning and aspirational tendencies within contemporary inter- pretations of historiography. Reisch questions the value and validity of a popularized cultural heritage as she reassembles historical moments and figures into jumbled compositions, much like a musical medley.
Engaging in a feminist reading of historiography her work triggers new readings and uncertainty within this déjà-vu.
