»Schöne neue Welt – The Moving Images« Are Extraordinary Things

Brooklyn, New York: Assembly Required presents the video installation Schöne neue Welt – The Moving Images at the group exhibition Extraordinary Things. Curated by Alina Girshovich & Heather Topcik. On view through October 2021. To see the video installation Bewegtbild, No. 1 click into the image below.

Video installation from the series Schöne neue Welt – The Moving Images. Video still of Bewegtbild, No. 1, 2021. Video (Color), 9:19 min. Click image to play the video (image © Elias Wessel and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn; text with courtesy of Assembly Required, 2021)

Meaning is constructed and reconstructed through context, language, perception, and time. Extraordinary Things displays past and present objects that we use and discard in order to foreground and reimagine what is seemingly inconsequential. Starting with a selection of Hall of Gowanus artifacts discovered in the Gowanus neighborhood, and placing them in conversation with contemporary artists, this exhibition seeks to challenge our perception of the familiar, and reframe the meanings we assign to the material culture that surrounds us. This recontextualization and sustained attention enable the ordinary to become extraordinary, allowing multiple perspectives to emerge and engage the human capacity for revision and change.

Schöne Neue Welt (Brave New World) is a series that started in New York City shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic and was finished in late 2020 in Germany. In the process, smartphones were being destroyed in every conceivable way – run over by a bus, thrown against walls, maltreated with a hammer, drowned, set on fire, burned. The displays were badly affected but the photographed representations of the destructed devices rendered aesthetically beautiful. In making the series, the artist started thinking about how difficult it becomes psychologically to destroy these “magic boxes” and how they almost transform into living creatures. This led to the video installation on view, Schöne Neue Welt – The Moving Images (2021), in which Wessel started documenting the moving “organic structures” that he witnessed during the destruction process. The artist continues to question if destruction is an integral part of beauty or, instead, if destruction can turn into something beautiful.

Curated by Alina Girshovich and Heather Topcik. Participating artists: Jamie Courville, Harley Ngai Grieco, Heidi Hankaniemi, Christina Kelly, Rosamond S. King, Spencer Merolla, Jenny Tobias, Elias Wessel, Pawel Wojtasik.

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