SHOAIR MAVLIAN & BJARNE BARE

Pixy Liao, Homemade Sushi, 2010(1).

Digitally Native

While there was a focus on so called 'post-internet art’ in the early 2000s, the art of that time was predominately made to be shown and experienced within traditional gallery spaces. How does that translate to the current 'space-less’ era, when art is increasingly moving online? Can we properly experience art without spatial involvement? These are some of the questions discussed by artist and curator Bjarne Bare and director of Photoworks, Shoair Mavlian. (Editor’s note: This conversation took place on the 15th of May.)

Bjarne Bare We’ve all been going through an unprecedented time recently with the pandemic, and just like every other field, the art world has had to adapt as best it can. As an artist, I’ve found new ways to show my work over the past months, and I’m interested to hear from your side, as a curator and director, how you’ve dealt with it. I'm also interested in how photography deals with this, because I see both good and bad sides for the medium in these times.

I’ve recently been struck by a paradox regarding the recent focus of the art-world on going digital, and comparing that to the ‘post-Internet’ age of the early 2010s. I was travelling to London quite extensively around that time, and I remember that in the artist-run galleries, especially around Peckham, there was so much focus on this idea of post-internet art. Everyone was kind of laughing at it and people were confused about the term, yet a lot of young artists were working with this idea of ‘art after the internet’, and were excited about the different ways in which the internet was influencing art. But they were formatting the works in the gallery space, and it didn't really feel like much of a critique at the time. This movement kind of peaked with the exhibition Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery in 2016.   When I revisit the video promoting that exhibition now,  the idea of the internet and the fascination behind it seems so dated already, and yet the show is only four years old. And all those works were taken from the virtual space into a white cube, whereas I think now we’re seeing the opposite of that, where we’re forcing the works from the exhibition spaces online. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences of how best to format works for online showing.

Shoair Mavlian When I was at university and during my studies, this kind of post-internet art moment was really at the centre of things. But by the time I entered the traditional museum world in 2008, it had almost disappeared. It's as if the promise and expectations of it didn't infiltrate into traditional museums. It's interesting that you mention artist-run spaces in parts of London like Peckham, which in the early 2000s, would have been very experimental and pre-gentrification, those kinds of spaces on the fringe. I started my career in a very traditional white cube gallery environment. I worked at Tate Modern for ten years, where the architecture and the experience of the physical gallery space were really important in relation to how we thought about curating exhibitions.

I think it's fair to say that curating for a white cube environment is something that you can learn relatively easily. You very quickly get used to curating in a traditional gallery and you learn this language of how to put physical objects in the space, even the language of transferring more temporal works like film and video into a gallery space. But there still isn't a good language for curating online. So to do that the other way around – to take things from the physical space and put them online – is still very problematic.

BB Do you see this as a platform issue? I'm thinking of Instagram as a share or die culture, where there's so much work and the feed lends itself to the idea of scrolling versus panning your eyes around the room. Putting together a series for a scrolling type of situation is inherently different. Could there be a different type of platform where digital curation would work better?

Farah Al Qasimi, Dragon Mart Light Display, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.

SM I think the problem lies in taking something and translating it into a form that isn’t its native form. So when we try and put a physical exhibition online and replicate a physical experience, that doesn't work. I find platforms like Instagram less problematic, because what’s so interesting about those types of platforms that are digitally native is that their sole purpose is to show photographic images in a digital context. They're not attempting to replicate a physical experience. 

BB I agree. I like the term ‘digitally native’. I think that could be a key to understanding this transition.

SM When I left Tate to become the director of Photoworks, it was a huge leap. Going from an organisation that’s primarily defined by the building that houses it – Tate Modern, which is this iconic building – and then moving to an organisation that’s never had a physical space, this was something that was completely foreign to me. It's been a very interesting process to get used to: separating the curatorial practice from a set physical environment. We constantly come across challenges related to it. I didn't train as a curator, I never went to university to study curatorial practices, but if you do, you’re still primarily taught that the end goal is to put things in a white cube. So as curators, we don't really have the tools to do anything outside this traditional remit.

BB I think as an artist as well, you’re always thinking of that physical space as some kind of an end point. Maybe I'm old-school or traditional, but for me, visiting an exhibition is a break from network technology. I can enter this space and it’s this quiet refuge in the city where I can contemplate. I've been thinking about how the internet can show art and, at the same time, function as this mental space, where I take a break from the digital sphere. But an exhibition online feels like another tab on my computer where I can’t find that focus. 

The conversations that have flourished recently online, I really enjoy those because curators and people who work in institutions are often pretty distant from the artist. Recently, I’ve enjoyed your conversations where you speak personally to an artist. Here in Los Angeles, Klaus Biesenbach, who recently became the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has been doing these at-home conversations. It's so nice to see a director of a big institution speak directly to artists in their home. It's a very different type of engagement.

I was thinking about this last week when I ‘went’ to Frieze, New York, with my friend Jennifer Piejko. It was funny – she sent me an invite link and we went together and we were texting as we were browsing through the fair. It was weird. At one point, it kind of felt nicer than an art fair, but she also mentioned that it felt like she was browsing through an online retailer for clothing. It's funny how the authors have borrowed that aesthetic for showing art online. In some way, it kind of feels like they're late to the game in doing that, because I can only imagine how collectors are enjoying browsing through a selection like this.

SM It's super interesting that you make that connection with online shopping. I guess now it's made the leap into the art world. From a curatorial perspective, as you say, it's a bit late. Curators have been using these types of visualisations, these virtual tools, to plan exhibitions for a long time. For at least five years, probably even more, there's been software available with which you can plan your exhibition before you install. I guess the difference is, when you're planning a show, you know that it's always just the preparation before you get into the space. It's never meant to be the end result, and I guess that's the key thing. These types of visualisations were never designed to replace the experience of going to an exhibition or the experience of going to an art fair.

BB Exactly.

SM They were designed as a planning tool and that's kind of where they fall down, I think. Since the Covid-19 situation has happened, we’ve adapted the tools that are available at this current moment, but they're not necessarily the right tools for the future.

BB For instance, is the Brighton Photo Biennial still happening this year? Or will you postpone it?

SM Yes, very good question. We run a biennial photo festival and it’s due to open at the end of September and we’ve decided not to postpone it. We’ve decided to go ahead, but we won’t have any physical, traditional exhibitions. Instead, we’re exploring the possibility of presenting the same idea through three different modes of delivery.

Theo Simpson, Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, 2020 supported by Jerwood Arts and Photoworks. Installation view at Jerwood Space, London. Photo: Anna Arca.

BB That's interesting.

SM So the theme is Alternative Narratives, which looks at contemporary projects that present alternative propositions to the traditional narratives found in the history of photography. Ironically, we were originally planning to challenge the model of a photography festival anyway. As you know, photography festivals are usually multi-venue and you walk across the city to ten, twenty, fifty different venues, and this year we wanted to challenge that. We’d planned to house the entire festival in one warehouse space, but that's obviously not possible anymore. Its too risky due to Covid-19 and new social-distancing precautions. 

Instead, what we’re planning on doing is having these three different modes of delivery. One is an outdoor exhibition, using the urban infrastructure that's already present, primarily advertising space that’s no longer being used. That will be one mode of delivery, an outdoor festival that you can view while social distancing. Even if we go back into a situation of lockdown, you should be able to visit it on your daily walk. 

The second mode of delivery is our annual magazine: the next magazine will be a deconstructed version of a photo festival that you can install in your home. The example that's most easy to reference is the practice of Dayanita Singh, who makes these exhibitions in a box that you can install in your home. She encourages you to live with it, install it in different ways, invite your friends over and have an exhibition opening. So it’s really embracing that idea that we can't have a festival where we all come and see it together, but we can send the festival to you and you can install it in your home or your classroom, or your community space and then we can talk about it together. 

The third mode of delivery will be our online platform, which activates those two physical elements. So you can go to the website and go into more depth about the festival through artist videos and audio guides. The online platform will be the equivalent of our hub, where we can host those digital conversations and talk to each other while still being surrounded by the festival in our own environments.

Essentially it's the same curatorial projects being presented in three different ways, or being accessed in three different ways. We wanted to use this situation to experiment with the festival model. You don't have to access all three – you could just engage with the outdoor exhibition, or you could just engage with the festival in your home, or you could just engage with the online element. So there are different entry points that all work together or separately.

BB Exactly. I think you're right in saying that the curatorial aspect is pretty much the same. There's still a clear agenda and a theme. I think that's what the audience is seeking. And it will be easier for someone like me, who’s on the other side of the world, to visit, which I like.

SM Yes. And one of the reasons we still print a physical magazine is because its portable and can travel around the world. We really didn't want to just have a digital festival, because I think what makes the digital interesting is its relationship to the physical. So those two things kind of go hand in hand and complement each other. I think we always have to remember that.

BB I totally agree. I've been thinking about that in terms of prints versus JPEGs. I had this discussion with my friend Sara R. Yazdani recently. In the past, I’ve always refused to publish my JPEGs – I prefer to show pictures of installation views, because I like the way the photograph appears in the space, and the print is of importance to me. She said I’m just old-fashioned. I just have to get over it. She was referencing Wolfgang Tillmans, for instance, who shares JPEGs left, right and centre, but he still has such an emphasis on the physical print in his practice.

This comes back to the art-fair ‘viewing rooms’: there was an article in the New York Times this week where they asked Jeff Koons about this, and he said: ‘They feel personal, they feel intimate. I love looking at images. I can be just as happy to look at an image of a Manet painting online. It’s really about the stimulation that a work has for you.’ I'm a little bit conflicted about his idea that a Manet painting can be as good online through its digital stimulation. I was thinking about what that means for you as a curator, when you're discovering new artists, and judging their practice from a digital reproduction. I know, for instance, you recently had Nico Krijno do a takeover on Instagram. His work is also very physical to me. Do you have any final notes on this sense of loss, in terms of sensibility, in the digital sphere? How might we try to recoup it?

Roger Eberhard, 24th Parallel South, Chile, 2018.

SM This is super interesting to me, because I grew up in Australia and my entire art-historical education was done through textbooks or the internet. I hate to admit this, but I was twenty-one and had already graduated university before I had the opportunity to physically stand in front of any of the European masterpieces.

BB Well in Norway we have a similar problem.

SM In Norway you get to see Munch.

BB That's true.

SM In terms of contemporary art and how I work now, I think that we've become extremely literate in reading images. We've not only become extremely good at understanding the subject matter of an image, but we also subconsciously know how to read the physical attributes of a JPEG or of an image that we see on screen. We're becoming better and better at that. So for me, when I'm viewing work online, unless it was work that was made to be viewed online, I subconsciously know that it's only the preview of what I'm going to see in real life. When I'm researching contemporary artists, I know if I'm interested in the work, I know if I want to see more, and hopefully, after I've done the research, I get to physically see it in its physical  form.

In terms of access, as long as we understand the difference between the photographic object and doing something digitally, then the digital realm obviously offers far greater access. If you don't have freedom of movement, or you don't have the financial resources to travel and see these things in real life, then the digital does offer something important. This whole Covid experience has made us remember that, as long as the digital doesn't replace the physical, then it's largely a positive thing.

BB I agree. I think the term you used earlier, ‘digitally native’, is interesting in this sense, because the digital viewing room doesn't have to replace the exhibition; it can be an additional mediating tool. We've become so fluent, like you said, in curating art into a white cube that maybe now there’s room for another arena that can play alongside the classical exhibition. And we can still look at installation views. Like I said, I was able to visit Frieze last week. I can experience this year’s Brighton Photo Biennial perhaps even more effectively than previous versions, without having to travel.

SM Exactly. Going back to something you said earlier, I’ve been thinking for a long time about artists’ expectations that they’ll exhibit in a white cube, or that the pinnacle of their career will be to exhibit in a white cube. It would be helpful if that began to shift. I think that comes down to how we’re taught in art school about exhibiting work. There are two things that I found really exciting, which pushed me to leave Tate. One was the fact that I wanted to work with artists of my generation, and the other was that I wanted to install things in experimental environments. But although that was really exciting from my perspective, it's actually very difficult to convince an artist to exhibit their work in a non-traditional gallery space, to print it on a material that's different. For instance, I did an exhibition in Spain a few years ago. It was in a dilapidated kind of manor house, which had one entire wall missing. It was basically open to the elements and you looked out onto the sea. We couldn't print any of the photographs on paper. I had to try and convince quite traditional photographers that we needed to print on fabric and other more durable materials  that would withstand the elements of the building. So that was a very interesting experience and I think something that’s kind of pertinent when we talk about the digital, because again, it's a different experience for an artist to give permission to show their work in a digital context.

BB Absolutely. And I think this is valid in terms of the understanding of labour as well. I did an online exhibition last week for Fotogalleriet in Oslo, where they asked me a month prior if I’d contribute with an online exhibition for their website and Instagram. It struck me, as I was working with it, that labour-wise and time-wise, I spent nearly as much time on a project like that as I would on an ‘actual’ exhibition. I think you as a curator have a similar experience: you're probably working at least as much now during this time and you also have to be more visible. People seem to be very active these days, which I’m very pleasantly surprised by. I feel optimistic about this.

SM What you say about labour is very important, because we have to make sure that we don't devalue digital content. We don't want that, since the art world is already very bad at not paying for labour. And just because it's online or just because it's digital doesn't mean that it doesn't take the same amount of time as doing it in the physical realm.

Alberta Whittle, Celestial Mediations II, 2017

The first Photoworks Festival - ​Propositions for Alternative Narratives - took place 24 September to 25 October 2020.