2.10.1
2020-01-28
Our first exhibition of 2020 Yeni Esthetik: The Eternal Networks of West Asia, is curated by Patrick Litchy.
For hundreds of years, Western Asia represented the pinnacle of networked society. The mail network was created by the Mongol Khanate, the Silk Road was the primary highway between East and West, linking Iran with China, sharing technology in antiquity and during the contemporary. Filiou’s notion of the Eternal Network resonated with me as I traveled these lands and saw the old connections through analog culture as well as the new through digital culture. In some ways, the metaphor of networks throughout time, from the Silk Road to the Information Superhighway ring true, even as countries like Iran and Kazakhstan increasingly control the traffic along the infobahn. As exhibitions like the Sharjah Biennial 12 work to break “Out of the (Western) Echo Chamber” (sic), I found that the media arts scenes of Central and West Asia encounter their own silos, and this version of Activatar intends to bring media artists from the region into this app-based gallery.
Yeni Esthetik, roughly “New Aesthetic” in Turkish, Azeri, and Qazaq) takes works from the media arts communities of the West Asian networks and wires them into broader contexts. Originally created in cooperation with the NEoN Art Festival (Dundee, Scotland) and The Wrong Biennial (Worldwide) Activatar presents Anvar Musrepov (KZ, AR), Mohsen HZ (IR, 360 degree video), and Shalala Salamzadeh (AZ, glitch video), as we reach across media borders to build new bridges where old ones were not, further extending the global Eternal Network.