Thursday 23 March 2023 - 5:58:24 pm
Wed 20-01-2021 17:00 PM
ABU DHABI, 20th January, 2021 (WAM) -- The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery, the University’s academic museum-gallery, has opened its first-ever virtual exhibition, titled not in, of, along, or relating to a line. On view until July 10th, 2021, the exhibition invites a new perspective on virtual and screen-based contemporary art, of particular relevance during COVID-19.
Co-curated by Chief Curator at NYU Abu Dhabi and Executive Director of The NYUAD Art Gallery Maya Allison, and NYUAD faculty member and artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, the exhibition unveiled four new commissions, alongside fourteen existing artworks.
In this exhibition of "born digital" work, artists make visible both the restrictions and the freedoms that a digital landscape offers. Four newly commissioned works also respond, directly and indirectly, to the pandemic’s role in our technological lives.
The Art Gallery’s Executive Director, Allison, describes a mysterious fourth new commission, "like other museums and galleries, we are proud to present a virtual tour of our physical space, where Maryam Al Hamra has curated an exhibition of sculptures from a museum in an alternate reality."
Dewey-Hagborg explains, "Instead of a list of links, or a sequence of screens, or a 3D render of our gallery, this exhibition is structured as a series of forking paths through born-digital artworks, a decentralized network diagram, the traversal of which is serendipitous. No two visitors will have the same experience. Its structure is inspired by early internet history and its anticipatory cultural predecessors: Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome. These ideas speak to visions of an earlier time, when the internet was fresh and new and seemed, to some, so full of potential."
