Fulcrum Arts welcomes artists Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (Amsterdam), and guest-curator Isabel de Sena (Berlin), as our first participants in the AxS Incubator.
Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness.
Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand’s installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.
Isabel de Sena is an independent curator, writer, and editor currently based in Berlin. She obtained an MA in Art History (Hons.) from Leiden University in The Netherlands, with a specialisation in Contemporary Art, Philosophy of Science, and Aesthetics. Focussing primarily on humour and absurdity in artistic approaches and epistemology, she has published in academic journals and exhibition catalogues, including The European Journal of Humour Research (2015), View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture (2015), and ‘Redemption Jokes’, (2015, nGbK Verlag, Berlin). Her curatorial work includes ‘ab-surdu’s. Via Lewandowsky: a case-study’ (2014, MOMENTUM Berlin), and ‘BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art form the Former Soviet Union and Other Myhtical Places’ (2015, Berlin, various venues, assistant curator to David Elliott). Current projects include exhibition and research project ‘Time Out of Joint’, in collaboration with CalArts, LIGO Caltech and PAC in Los Angeles; a monograph catalogue of Theo Eshetu, published by DAAD Berlin; and co-scriptwriting for a film by Bjørn Melhus.
Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand will pursue a 4-week period of research beginning mid- November in collaboration with LIGO Caltech and the Art & Technology Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Working closely with theoretical and experimental physicists at LIGO and through a 4-day workshop with students at CalArts, they will prod the peculiar dynamics of gravitational radiation as well as its black hole sources. Combining experimental advancements in water-wave gravitational modelling and quantum hydrodynamics, they will create diversely mobilized liquid environments that will serve as an arena for staging perceptually challenging analogues of gravity. Their research will lead to a new installation-piece titled Orbifold: a special commission to be completed in 2017.
This project is initiated by PAC guest-curator Isabel de Sena, and takes place within the framework of her upcoming exhibition, Arrival of Time, to open in Berlin on June 30th 2017 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, in collaboration with Berliner Festspiele/Immersion.
The residency will culminate in a symposium on Saturday, December 10, 3-4:30pm, hosted by ArtCenter College of Design in conjunction with the exhibition UNCERTAINTY, currently on view at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery. Speakers will include Isabel deSena, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Professor Rana Adhikari (LIGO Caltech), and Professor Tom Leeser (Director of the Art and Technology Program & Center for Integrated Media, CalArts). The symposium will be followed by a reception in the Williamson Gallery.
This project is made possible by the generous support of The Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional in-kind support has been provided by Shed Research Institute, and Christopher Wormald.
