I Am All of Glass – Marianne Brandt and the Art of Glass Today

The celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus is currently on focus and both Kunstverein Villa Arte e. V. and the Chemnitz Museum of Industry welcome you to the exhibition I Am All of Glass – Marianne Brandt & the Art of Glass Today.

Die Summe meiner Daten, On Series, No. 5 and No. 6, 2017 in the exhibition I Am All of Glass – Marianne Brandt & the Art of Glass Today at the Chemnitz Museum if Industry. September 28 - December 1, 2019 (image courtesy ARD, Tagesschau, Industriemuseum Chemnitz and Villa Arte e. V., 2019)

Selected works from Die Summe meiner Daten are included within the exhibition. Glass displays of smartphones and tablets mark a border between the digital and the tangible space. They serve as a window and functional interface to the digital world, on which associated human actions appear. Traces, marks and fingerprints resulting from the everyday use of digital devices with touch-sensitive screens, allow us to analyze activities or state of health of an individual. Analogous to the digital fingerprint, interpretations about the respective individual can be made on the basis of analogue traces and thus can be used for various interests. But the fear of being turned into »transparent citizens« which aroused 1987 by the census of the Federal Republic of Germany, seems hardly present in the era of digitization. Often we use our digital devices without thinking that our traces left in the World Wide Web are accessible and usable by others. By demarcating virtual and real space, our digital data seems to vanish, as if our digital fingerprint – like on the glass surface of our touch screen – would soon be wiped away and become invisible. But the digital space never forgets. The traces marks and fingerprints in the photographs of Die Summe meiner Daten result from a functional and sometimes playful interaction between the human being and our todays communication devices. The traces emerge from our everyday use of smartphones and tablets, from typing and wiping, writing emails, SMS or WhatsApp messages, booking train tickets or using other functional apps. Artistic strategies make perceptible the seemingly hidden in a combination of photography and gestural painting. The superimposing structures on the glass displays culminate into palimpsest-like, painterly-appearing photographs that not only reflect on the properties and function of the photographed material, but also document the simultaneity of digitization, surveillance and identity.

The exhibition is on view from September 28 - December 1, 2019

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