Thanks to the organizers for having invited me to contribute to this performance!
For the Time Being is curated by six postgraduate students seeking to explore the shifting responsibilities of institutions in this networked age, as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2019 at Royal College of Art, London. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery.
For the Time Being is an experimental programme of photo-performance, conceived as a response to the everyday presence of social media. The project invites 5 international contemporary artists Agil Abdullayev, Feng Mengbo, Max Grau and Tamara Kametani and artist collective Agorama to reflect on the role of image sharing networks in their personal lives.
Through a series of on and offline events and performances, the artists will interrogate the way in which popular apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Instagram have affected understandings of intimacy, digital connectedness and notions of personal and collective memory.
The project uses Snapchat, an app devised to share intimate, disappearing images, as a central protagonist. Originally designed with unique features of instantaneity, intimacy and ephemerality, Snapchat quickly rose to cult popularity amongst a generation of millennials who used it to develop a means of communication that was playful, creative, subversive, and entirely their own. Today, the artists featuring in For the Time Being use Snapchat as a medium and a tool through which they reflect on debates within contemporary social media. The programme, therefore, presents an assemblage of ideas reflecting on big issues such as internet identities, fake news and data privacy, to more personal encounters of nostalgia and memory.
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KATHARINA NIEMEYER 