Dagmar Schürrer

stateofexeption final out-1

Dagmar Schürrer

HANDS / Video loop / 2020

Project description

It is a video loop with sound with the working title HANDS.

It is another reflection on my for a few months ongoing research on the topic of materiality, touch, haptic and physicality in the digital realm (and the illusion of them). This research became even more current during the lockdown. In the current situation of isolation we are supposed to keep our distance and more processes are transferred to the digital world. All we touch is the keyboard of our computers. This is for me an exceptional moment. How are we are going to stimulate the so important skin sense in the digital future? 

#CritiqueAndHumanism

“Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is very  easy to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various “fields” of any epoch, such that on one side lies the “productive,” “forward-looking,” “lively,” “positive” part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative.

On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too — something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.”

Walter Benjamin, from Arcades p

Dagmar Schürrer is an Austrian artist currently based in Berlin. Her artistic focus lies on the moving, digital image. She assembles found footage, digitally generated objects and animations, text, drawings and sound to form intricate video montages, evocative of painting, collage and poetry. She holds a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, amongst others at the New Contemporaries at the ICA London, the Impakt Festival in Utrecht, NL, the Moscow Biennale for Young Art and the Transmediale Vorspiel in Berlin. Her videos have been screened at numerous festivals: SUPERNOVA in Denver, the Seattle Film Festival, the Horn Experimental Film Festival in Israel, Tricky Women Festival in Vienna, or the Diagonale Film Festival in Graz. In recent years she received the Goldrausch Scholarship of the Senate of Berlin, and was shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize and the Tenderpixel Award in London.

Artists #stateofexception

The project is being implemented by

+359 Gallery, Art Project Depot,  in partnership with KX – Critique & Humanism Publishing House.  They will add comments in the form of quotations from books they have published to the images prepared by the artists for the project.