Artist in Residency from March until November 2020, Sebastian Lütgert will have his solo exhibition at the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg. As part of his residency, Sebastian will as well give a lecture and a workshop for students in the winter semester 20/21 at HfK Bremen.
text from the announcement by Edith Russ Haus:
"Due to the current situation, the artist could not always be reached promptly. Recent recordings indicate that, in addition to a retrospective of video works from the last ten years, an installation specially designed for the Powder Tower will also be shown, which in an autobiographical form uncritically examines the places where - and the conditions under which - these works were created.
Sebastian Lütgert, media artist and author, lives in Berlin, sometimes in Bombay, occasionally in Bangalore and Delhi, with regular stops in Dubai, Beirut and Cairo, where he is known as the developer of the pan.do/re video archive platform and the Pad.ma Media Server. He works as a freelancer for bak.ma and 858.ma. In Beijing, Lütgert was last seen on December 16, 2019, when boarding the KLM898 flight to Amsterdam."
As part of the show, Sebastian created a website as the online interface for the video
retrospective of his work.
artist's statement regarding the exhibition:
"CECI N'EST PAS UN ARTIST STATEMENT. some shows will open, some shows will
close, some will try both and some will kind of take place, but not really,
they will mostly take time, and that's a limited resource for most, so maybe
there is no point in artificially reducing attendance. there will be so many
shows that if everyone is just going to show for their own shows, no-one will
show for anyone else's, which is why, personally, i'm still hedging my bets.
audiences will be scarce, scattered, fleeting, yet welcome, at least up to a
point, and the term "opening" will have to be interpreted very liberally, which
is not always a bad thing, just this time around. in commercial galleries,
it'll be kind of okay, but lets worry about institutions for a moment, because
all of a sudden, they all say they care, and everything that deals with that
concept, however remotely, will turn out to be so utterly and comically
careless that it's going to be a neverending source of both bewilderment and
amusement, like in that joke that goes like "the only place where 'care' comes
before 'career' is in the dictionary." which in the grand scheme of things is
not a big deal, but mistakes will be made and certain words will be used to
announce certain shows, and that is regrettable. some say they've seen it all
coming, 2020, perfect vision, and if you need curatioral assistance to know
which way the wind blows, you're not going to make it with anyone anyhow,
you're just going to feel a little dizzy, and surprisingly isolated, especially
in crowds and at corona parties. it's called "the art world", after all, and
this is the moment when the short summer of deconfinement is giving way to the
eternal september of 2020, which provides us with a pronounced sense of
community and the urge to buy time in large quantities before it all falls
apart, but again: not really, and it's hard to say if that's a good thing or
not. personally, i wouldn't worry too much about the apocalypse, we're going to
fuck it up once more, and the worst thing that can happen is that it gets a
little crowded on the social distancing front, especially towards the end of
the room where the bar is, which is where you'd find me if it wasn't a no-show.
to just not show doesn't make it not a show though. other that that, it can
sometimes be a huge disadvantage for artists if they identify too strongly with
themselves or their own work, but as steve jobs said: artists ship, so to go
with the flow and play it like everyone else does and stay clear of obstacles
is probably advisable, and some inconvenience is always regrettably welcome, if
not unavoidable. at least none of the below, or above, depending on last-minute
design errors, will be online, so you don't have to click on anything. xoxo etc"
biography
Sebastian Lütgert is an artist, programmer, writer, co-founder of Bootlab and Pirate Cinema Berlin. He has co-initiated a number of projects on intellectual property, cinema and the internet, including textz.com (2001), the cinema archive 0xdb.org, The Oil of the 21st Century project, Pad.ma, Indiancine.ma, bak.ma, 858.ma, and the open media archive pan.do/ra. He lives in Berlin.
Publications
"Introduction to a True History of the Internet", Subsol 2, 2001.
"Introduction dans une histoire vraie d'Internet", textz.com, [2002]. (French)
"The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction", Makeworlds 4, 2004.
"The Society of Intellectual Property", textz.com, 2005.
Lütgert, et al., "10 Theses on the Archive", Apr 2010.
"Down and Out in All the Wrong Places (Berlin 2010)", e-flux 17, Jun 2010.
"Notes on Collaboration", Oct 2010. [1]
Links