The starting point of this series is 3D scans (photogrammetry) of monoblock chairs in their natural environment—the beach. The 3D models are then digitally distorted and printed with a Xerox on paper. The prints are subsequently distorted once again into physical waves. This project explores the boundaries of digital and physical mediums, reflecting on how reality becomes distorted through digital means.

3D Paper collage, 24x30cm, 2023.

Available works

A Lying Sun

Anna Mirkin

Katharina Trudzinski

Curators:

Yolandé Gouws and Helen-Sophie Mayr

In collaboration with Im Turm Galerie Berlin

27.4.23 - 4.6.23

The title of the exhibition, A Lying Sun, refers to a promising bright winter sun, yet one that gives no warmth. In the same way, Katharina Trudzinski and Anna Mirkin play with the notions of the appearance of the digital and physical realms. Together they explore the relationship of these two realities that are perpetually evolving in tandem: one catering to our five senses, the other to our fantasies.

Katharina Trudzinski’s sculptures are somewhat digital in her choice of bright, unabashed colors flowing seamlessly into each other. In her practice, she places these sculptures in muted urban landscapes, where they seem like digital appearances, taking a step from physical into digital reality.

Anna Mirkin's work, on the other hand, digitally digests the physical urban landscape and reintroduces it to the viewer in an altered physical form. The process starts with Mirkin scanning physical objects in urban environments to create digital versions of those objects. Secondly, the objects are unfolded, unwrapped, or digitally altered. Finally, the digital objects are reintroduced into the physical realm by printing onto physical fabrics.

The first part of the exhibition A Lying Sun was in Berlin in 2022, the second is taking place in Tel Aviv in 2023. For both exhibitions the artists collaborated in exploring the ambivalent space that overlaps both the digital and the physical realms. In their choice of imagery – bougainvillea bushes, motorcycles, and plastic chairs, to name a few – clearly refer to the immediate surroundings of the two exhibition venues: Galerie im Turm in Friedrichshain, Berlin, and Almacén Gallery in Jaffa. Merging items from the two cities in the gallery space, the artists create a playful, shimmering colorful installation for visitors to experience. The interweaving of analogue content into digital spaces and vice versa entices the eyes with captivating glitches scattered throughout the exhibition.

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Exhibition Credits:

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Curators: Yolandé Gouws and Helen-Sophie Mayr

Graphic Design: Avihai Mizrahi

Documentation: Tal Nisim and Daniel Hanoch

Text editor: Orna Yehudaioff

Hebrew translation: Sivan Raveh

Mounting: Gili Natan

Production: Yaniv Lachman

Documentation photos: Daniel Hanoch

Special thanks to Kfir Mualem and Ofri Lapid

Collaboration with Katharina Trudzinski, Im Turm Galerie , Berlin, 2022.

In their collaborative work, Anna Mirkin and Katharina Trudzinski interweave the immediate surroundings of the two exhibition sites of A Lying Sun: Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Berlin, Friedrichshain. Playfully, the artists let the cityscapes flow into each other, break them up and expand them through their sparkling glitches. In doing so, they explore the possibilities of digital, three-dimensional space, especially with regard to the individual design and appropriation of public space and urban architecture.

Noa Heyne & Anna Mirkin

Neun Kelche Gallery

Curators: Kira Dell, Laura Seidel

May 7 – June 3, 2022

The exhibition UX is the first duo show of the two Berlin-based artists Noa Heyne and Anna

Mirkin. The artists met in 2021 at LABA Berlin, a fellowship program for Jewish art and culture, and in this context developed their first collaborative work. With the eponymous installation, they are deepening their shared interest in the question of freedom of choice. In their participatory work, they set out from the interface of analog and digital, and confront us with the illusion of one's own freedom of choice in digital spaces which has long determined our behavior in analog spaces and made it physically tangible.

In their collaboration, the artists intertwine elements of their individual practice as well as shared interests. An important component of Noa Heyne's practice is the physical participation of the audience. Often inspired by puppet theatre and architecture, she creates movement-driven spaces that question the stability of our environment and destabilize the orientation of the body in that environment. Time and again, the human body in its architectural environment is the starting point for her installations. With a background in fashion design, textiles and techniques such as prints or embroidery are central to Anna Mirkin's artistic practice. In her interdisciplinary approach, she develops expansive installations. In these, Mirkin explores how a collective subconscious is revealed in everyday situations and how personal lives are influenced by computer-generated data.

Heyne and Mirkin are connected by their interest in participatory visual narratives and the motif of repetition as a working mode. In UX, they explore of the impact of algorithm-driven spaces on the human body and its freedom of movement and agency. As an abbreviation of the term User Experience, the title refers to the user's experience when interacting with a product or an environment. At first glance, UX seems to be a playful setting, but at the same time confronts visitors with the underlying structures of digital spaces.

The installation consists of fragmented fine steel sculptural elements draped with flowing fabric lengths distributed throughout the space. Their surfaces are reminiscent of screens and their arrangements create a semi-open space illuminated by selfie rings. Some of the rings face the audience and invite them to come closer. In the center of the room, an oversized mobile is stretched out, wherein the sculptural and textile works are brought together: a flat, collage-like steel sculpture is framed by fabrics printed in bright colors. The prints depict plants, animals, and individual objects, such as the white garden chair that repeatedly appears in Mirkin's practice. Sometimes they seem to merge psychedelically into the strong background colors, sometimes they dissolve into their components and, in the case of a tiger, become a two-dimensional version of themselves. Further back in the room, a colorfully printed sheet of fabric flows through a selfie ring. In the middle of it is an animation in which the animals of the prints can be found again – tigers and fish merge into each other in the digital collage and are surrounded by large plants. At first glance, this seems to be a welcoming environment, alluding to visual backgrounds of perfectly staged social media images that invite the visitors to photograph themselves in it. But the unexpected movements of the sculptures gradually change the perception of the space.

The single parts of the installation are movement-controlled: programming in the background reacts to the visitors and influences the course of movement of the individual elements. The correlation between one's movements and those of the installation is not comprehensible to the audience and the viewing of the installation is thus disturbed by unexpected movements in the space. The sculptures begin to open and close for no apparent reason. The brief privacy is disrupted and the sculptures become protagonists themselves. In the middle of the installation, the carousel with its meter-long lengths of fabric begins to rotate and equally confronts the visitors with sequences of movements that are linked to their presence in the space, over which they cannot exert any deliberate influence.

In their installation, which uses both digital and analog media, Heyne and Mirkin make it possible to experience the control of shadow algorithms of digital spaces on the body. The artists show us how they continuously invade our privacy and manipulate our behavior. The feeling of freedom of choice often turns out to be fictitious, as most choices are in fact predetermined. In this environment of moving images and objects, visitors are confronted with their own powerlessness and the construction of their own identity in artificial environments. The illusion of self-determination and privacy disappears and opens up the renegotiation of the evolving duet between human and algorithm.

Technical production: Nuño de la Serna

Technical consultation: Robert Lieber

Katharina Trudzinski & Anna Mirkin | The horizon, 2022

For HOT MESS Katharina Trudzinski and Anna Mirkin are presenting a site-specific installation The horizon.

The work of Trudzinski and Mirkin intersects at the transitional stages between flat surfaces and 3D objects, creating an illusion of physical volume. Their first collaborative installation is a humorous take on the classical theme of landscape, an intentionally absurd attempt at the impossible - replacing nature with a digital environment , and creating a light cloud out of physically rigid materials.

Both artists initially stem from textile and fashion design, wherein two dimensional materials are used in three dimensions and abstract forms are made to interact with physical bodies and spaces.

Installation for ‘Opening Hours’ group exhibition, organaized by Fünfter Löffel, curated by Neuköllner Salon e.V. at Treptow-Ateliers e.V. 2022, Berlin.

Anna Mirkin is not interested in depicting the sober reality of the Monoblocs. She transports the chairs into abstract worlds. Weightless, they float in front of pastel-coloured horizons and appear like the platonic ideal of garden furniture. The Monobloc, as a piece of furniture that is anchored in the collective subconscious, is brought to the surface as an alienated new thing. Henry Massonet's idea of mass production meets an individual and their concrete and personal ideas of what can be.

2023 - JOMO group exhibition, MOM art space, Hamburg, GR.

2021 - A Place I Remember But Still Haven't Been To, Schaufenster Gallery, Berlin, GR.

In the past 2 decades the presence of AI surveillance has been exponentially growing and become an integral part of our lives. Many see their loss of privacy as a fair trade off for technology. From location tracking to face recognition, AI is learning the way we sound, move and think at a high pace. This installation shows the banal gesture of taking a photo of the sunset through the lens of AI. An endless stream of images creating patterns through which data can be collected and analysed.

This collaborative performance examines our relationship to nature and travelling in times of a global lockdown. The gallery space was used as a photo studio, with a green screen and monobloc plastic chair. Each participant received a personalised printed postcard; a fictional memory generated through a dialogue with the artist, merging the visual world of the artist with the personal experiences of others.

When escaping to far-away destinations becomes almost impossible we are left only with memories and possibilities of future plans. These memories are constantly regenerated in our minds, morphing and changing into distorted representations of a long-gone reality. And so are the future plans; generated as collages from our own personal memory and travel photos of others.

3-4.10.20

Kuchling Gallery, Berlin, Germany

A series of collages created in 2020

Drawings created in 2019

Created in collaboration with Mayan Prinz

The installation shows dying house plants collected from homes in Berlin and placed in the capsule under artificial growing light. The pink light cannot save the plants at this point, at best, it will prolong and improve their last days, creating a hospice for plants. The plants are going through a natural process, while the pink light serves as human manufactured manipulation, a failing attempt to stop the inevitable.

Firehouse Sessions #02

The event is part of Vorspiel / Transmediale and CTM Festival 2020

Solo Exhibition

12.9.2019

Site spesific installation at Heder Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Isrel.

Solo exhibition at Kibutz Be'eri Gallery, curated by Ziva Jelin. 2017

Publication - Exhibition catalogue. Text By Ziva Jelin and Keren Goldberg. Kibutz Be'eri, 2017.

View Exhibition Catalogue here

Photos by Tom Marshak