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