Warren Neidich | NEUROMACHT – Noise and the Possibility for a Future

Warren Neidich | NEUROMACHT – Noise and the Possibility for a Future

Solo Exhibition at PRISKA PASQUER
April 14, 2018 – September 1, 2018

Artistic interventions create new connections in the world as well as in the neural plastic brain. This is the power of Art. (Warren Neidich)

In his artistic practice, Warren Neidich (*1958, New York), author, art theoretician, and interdisciplinary post-conceptual artist, concerns himself with the ways in which these conditions have altered our habits of perception and conception. He combines his studies in art, neuroscience, medicine, and architecture to question technology’s role in “sculpting the brain” as a force with the potential for repression as well as emancipation.
His exhibition NEUROMACHT – Noise and the Possibility of a Future at PRISKA PASQUER in Cologne, Germany, presents installations, sculptures and performance including various media like neon, photography, video, noise, and painting. A number works will be featured. Pizzagate (2017) is a large-scale neon sculpture shaped like the iCloud logo and diagrammatically configured as a network. The Infinite Replay of One’s Own Self Destruction, #1 and #2 (2014) consist of broken speakers that emit a cacophony of noise. In his improvisational performative work Scoring the Tweet(s) (2017), he uses a cut and paste method first devised in Surrealism and later in the works of William Burroughs, to alter and rearrange the one hundred and ninety-six tweets of Donald Trump that mention fake news to create a graphic score. This score was installed for its performance at PRISKA PASQUER in the evening of May 12, 2018. In Double Vision – Louse Point (1997-2000), a series of photographs were made with apparatuses of neuro-ophthalmology that are used in the assessment of squint, which are then superimposed over the photographic camera lens producing what Neidich calls a “hybrid dialectic” in which two parallel historical, material trajectories are intertwined on the surface of the resulting colour photographs. Works of art history also become reference points in the Wrong Rainbow Paintings (2012-14), which are based on historic landscape paintings such as those in which the artist purposefully misrepresents the colours of the rainbow. Double Sausage Tango (2018) is based on an artificial neural network that causes a switch from a blue flaccid sausage to an erect red one. The two sausages are connected by hidden intermediate links, which are formed from found vintage neon.

Warren Neidich lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He has taught at Berlin’s Weissensee School of Art since 2016. In 2014, he established the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) in Switzerland, a summer academy that has been based in Berlin since 2016. He is visiting scholar at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles His awards and fellowships include studio fellowships at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, the Villém Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale Berlin, the AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship, Bristol, the British Academy Fellowship in London, the International Artist Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS) and the Fulbright Scholar Program, American University, Cairo.

Neidich’s extensive national and international exhibition activity includes individual and group exhibitions including shows at MoMA, PS1 and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LAXART and LACE in Los Angeles, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, Manifesta 10 Parallel Program St. Petersburg, the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, and MAK, Vienna.