CYFEST 15: VULNERABILITY, VENICE – Frants gallery space

CYLAND MediaArtLab presents the International Media Art Festival CYFEST 15: Vulnerability, Venice.

🗓️April 15—August 30, 2024

CREA—One Contemporary Art Space 📍211/B, 30133, Sestiere Dorsoduro, Venezia 30123 Italy

◆CYLAND MediaArtLab presents the International Media Art Festival CYFEST 15: Vulnerability, Venice◆

CYFEST 15: Vulnerability is a series of traveling exhibitions hosted worldwide. CYFEST 15 took place in Yerevan, Armenia and Miami, USA, in 2023, and will continue in Venice, Italy, in 2024.

The (anti)fragility of biological, social and cyberspaces, personal memories, and scientific imagination, the facsimile of rain and indexical, asemiotic writing, artistic exploration of non-human co-authorship, and a connection between knitting patterns and Mandelbrot sets all converge in our new major group exhibition.

The program features installation, performance, and discursive formats. Key commissions include the multi-disciplinary project Drop Tracer, studying nonhuman agencies and the relationship between images and the natural world by Tuula Närhinen. Ann Marie Maes’ bacterial-grown skins investigate the sculptural potential of organic materials and interfaces between the human and the non-human, the macroscopic and the microscopic. Pioneers of science art, Where Dogs Run collective, look at the terms of the Mandelbrot sets as expressed through knitting patterns in a live performative installation. Mariateresa Sartori, through the frottage technique, gives value to the unseen geology and casts light upon the little-known story of the quarry in Rosà, Vicenza. Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov’s media installation recreates the concept of «Time Density» developed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev. This exhibition also features rarely exhibited monotypes «Re-Pressions» by the acclaimed Armenian artist Samvel Baghdasaryan (1956-2017), experimental video art works by Fabrizio Plessi, inflatable fabric sculptures by Irina Korina, architectural and urbanistic objects made of recycled LEDs by Alexandra Dementieva, newly commitioned installation by Anna Frants and much more.

🎨Artists: Samvel Baghdasaryan, Ludmila Belova, Max Blotas, Alexandra Dementieva, Alexey Dymdymarchenko, Yvetta Fedorova, Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, Irina Korina, Natalia Lyakh, Anne Marie Maes, Phill Niblock & Katherine Liberovskaya, Tuula Närhinen, Nao Nishihara, Fabrizio Plessi, Mariateresa Sartori, Monica Naranjo Uribe, Where Dogs Run.

CYFEST 15 is organized by CYLAND International MediaArtLab. The project’s general sponsor is One Market Data. The project is made possible in collaboration with the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, The Centre for Studies in Russian Art — CSAR, LEONARDO ISAST, Samvel Baghdasaryan Art Foundation, and Weave.

PROGRAM

April 15–19 — Press Opening

April 19 — Opening Night with performance by Nao Nishihara

April 22 — Vulnerability. The panel will bring renowned thinkers and practitioners from the fields of Arts, Science, Technology, Business and Design to discuss the value of vulnerability.

ABOUT CYFEST

CYFEST, one of the biggest international media art festivals in Eastern Europe, was founded by a group of independent artists and curators in 2007. Since its inception in 2007, CYFEST’s main concerns have been to examine the dialogue between various visual languages and technology cultures, and thus to explore a way of commoning with both art professionals and scientific communities. CYFEST unites artists, curators, educators, engineers, programmers, and media activists all over the world, and creates a platform for mapping, mediation, and documentation of new media art on different regional and international levels.

CYFEST is one of the world’s few nomadic cultural events: throughout the year, festival projects are presented at leading cultural institutions around the world. Each year, the festival program includes several exhibition projects, sound art, video and educational programs.

The first CYFEST constituted a small program of events. The festival exposition opened with Andy Warhol’s installation Silver Clouds contributed by the artist’s museum in Pittsburg (U.S.A.). The festival has also been memorable by the exhibition History of the E.A.T. 1960–2000, dedicated to the lab Experiments in Art and Technology of engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. In subsequent years, CYFEST has consistently expanded, becoming more comprehensive and complex. From 2007 to 2023, over 350 artists and collectives participated in it. Among them are the pioneers of electronic music, some of the more influential experimental musicians in U.S. history: David Rosenboom, Phill Niblock, and Al Margolis; Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and theoretician of media art, director of Z.K.M. Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe Peter Weibel; artist, founder, and editor-in-chief of e-flux journal Anton Vidokle; innovative video artist Bjørn Melhus; conceptual artist and author of the first total installations Irina Nakhova and others. The festival projects in Venice and New York in 2019-2023, organized in collaboration with Kolodzei Art Foundation, united works of contemporary artists with creations of the XX century classics: Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Mihail Chemiakin, Ernst Neizvestny, Francisco Arana Infante, Valentina Povarova, Lydia Masterkova, Komar and Melamid, Faith Ringgold, Chakaia Booker, and others.

Since 2020, CYFEST has collaborated with the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology Leonardo, contributed to the Leonardo Journal and organized LASER Talks. The last issue of Leonardo, put out by the M.I.T. Press, contains texts of the world-renowned French artist whose work enacts the most significant biotechnological and trans-personal metamorphosis in the history of art ORLAN and the internationally recognized multi-disciplinary collective of artists, designers, and writers Slavs and Tatars.

More info > cyfest.art