The Mini Museum of XXI Century Arts

Can a screen display with a digital memory be enough to archive, store and display the most relevant art of the XXI century? Welcome to the MINI Museum! The MINI Museum is a Link Art Center production.

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Anette Friedrich Johannessen, Bathroom Rave, 2014. Performance, video documentation, 9:44 min

“For the last couple of years I have been working on a series on “home video pop performances”. Most of them have taken place within the privacy of my own house. The work started as a student abroad, where I often used my own bedroom as office, sleeping area, artist studio and dining area. My communication with the outside world (family and friends at home) could only take place over the Internet. I spent a lot of time on Facebook or Skype, and it was within this interaction with people my work started evolving to where it is today. There was a big lack of physical contact, and social media took a major part in my life. Relating to this sense of looking, without really being able to interact properly, the home videos emerged. Social media’s greatest advantage is that it is immediate in its nature, YouTube especially. It’s like a snapshot, but when uploaded it could stay there indefinitely. YouTube has evolved to a place where everyone’s sharing their “expertise”, hoping to be acknowledged and respected for their skill. Worldwide fame could strike in an instant - but it rarely does. And sometimes, knowing that your most private moments probably won’t be seen by anyone – not even those closest to you – makes it easier to let strangers into your private and personal spheres. The shear amount of videos uploaded drowns out most voices, leaving YouTube as an overwhelming mosaic of public privacy. The lo-fi visuals and rough narration have become a recognized language. It is within this language that my videos operate.”

Anette Friedrich Johannessen is a Norwegian artist. She did her BA at Camberwell College of Arts (London), after educating from KiB art school (Bergen). Friedrich Johannessen has participated in several exhibitions and shows (both solo and collaborative) in England, Norway, Russia, and Germany, and has held a residency at the “Institut Für Alles Mögliche” in Berlin in 2013.

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Channel TWo, Best of Times, Worst of Times, 2007 - 2008. Series of 4 videos, 1 min each

CH2 is a new media studio focused on mixed up reality, authorized formats/unauthorized ideas, systems of control, and radical togetherness. CH2 is named for the idea of "transmission" (Channel) and for the acronym of the people involved (TWo): Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Westbrook, and their son Oskar Westbridge. CH2 is interested in luck, levels, and trespassing through the contexts of landscape, interactivity, data, and augmented reality. The motivations underlying CH2's research/practice are aesthetic, social, and political. CH2 uses media, game platforms, communication ephemera, and mobile apps to reveal paradigms, complexity, contradictions, and cognitive dissonance. Recent CH2 projects include:  Episodes, a multi-level playable virtual landfill installation with an accompanying scratch-off lotto card system; openSource Abortion, a git hub repository; polyCopRiotNode, an augmented reality intervention of database error induced home invasions; Find Each Other. Begin There, a networked 2-channel virtual cornfield game installation; and t4int3d [<3] (read: tainted love) a downloadable collection of computer viruses and executables inspired by a love story.

More: https://vimeo.com/onchanneltwo/videos

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Laurus Edelbacher, defenestrate//rec, 2014 Single channel video, 2.44. Screen capture (documentation of the web project Defenestrate, 2014). View video (Vimeo) Defenestrate is a net based work made with content from Google Images and YouTube, in which the computer interface metaphor of the window is confronted with its real counterpart. “I like the idea of remixing and recycling material, manipulating / glitching it and changing / breaking the context”, writes Edelbacher. “It is important for me to become aware of what we are seeing, not just the closed off windows, but also the frame that contains / isolates them. As a reference I thought about windows which can’t be opened anymore, where you can’t interact with the outside and change the way you see it. Just like the frames on our digital devices, their interface, only allows us to see the surface not what’s beneath it. With this work I want to think / break through this barricade, as if you are throwing something out of a window.” Laurus Edelbacher (http://laurusedelbacher.at/) is an Austrian sculptor and new media artist. His practice spans a broad range of digital media and physical materials, often combining both in his works.

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Chris Brans, MINImuseum, 2012

Video, 3.37’’. View the video (Youtube). Exhibited in the artist’s apartment in Kampen on Saturday, April 21, 2012

MINImuseum (2012) is a video tutorial that turns the institution upon itself, generating an infinite loop that reflects on how, when you are working within an institutional framework, the museum itself - be it the outcome of an archistar studio or a Chinese sweatshop - always gets the upper hand over the art displayed in it.

Chris Brans (Assen 1985) lives and works in Kampen, The Netherlands. MINImuseum has been on public display at his apartment in Kampen on Saturday, April 21, 2012.

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Belchkitchen (Quinten Dierick), Let's take some distance from noiseculture, 2011

Slideshow, no sound. View the video (Youtube). Exhibited in Tape-Treff at Perron 026, Arnhem (November 17, 2011) and TAPE-bar, Arnhem (December 7, 2011). View documentation (Flickr)

TapeTreff is a tape and cassette-based happening organized by artist-initiative Belchkitchen (Quinten Dierick) a few times a year at different locations. People can bring in tapes of any kind: no selection, no hierarchy. Tape Jockeys play and manipulate sounds coming from cassettes, reel to reel tapes and VHS. In this occasion, the MINI Museum was mounted on the Tape Jockey table, displaying Let's take some distance from noiseculture (2011), a slideshow of very harsh, down-filtered, hyper-focused, re-captured, re-written, re-interpreted, feedbacked imagery with sound. At the TAPE-bar, a corner was installed with the MINI Museum and two “Shitmixers” (mixing consoles made of scrapings out of the drains of a print-place) and a possibility for the people to listen.

According to Belchkitchen, “the evenings were very nice and low profile. Many people showed up. The MINI Museum was exposed in a fuzzy environment, and got surprisingly good attention for its intimacy.”

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Roger Ng, Image Editor, 2010 - ongoing

Digital images, slideshow. Exhibited at Lianzhou Foto 2013, an International Photo Festival in Lianzhou, GuangDong, China (from November 23 to December 12, 2013 - More info

Image Editor is a photography project started in 2010. Roger Ng gathered / stole some scratched political banners from the streets in Hong Kong and repaired them. For some candidates who got serious damage on their face, he even used part of the faces of their opponents in order to repair them. According to the artist, "banners are not simply for political use when they appear in public space. They interact with people, creating a platform for citizens to leave their views onto. They belong to society. I collected these banners, and listened to their voices. Through repairing their images, I left my comment on them."

The work has been put on show - in installation form and as an image loop on the Mini Museum - at Lianzhou Foto 2013, an International Photo Festival in Lianzhou, GuangDong, China. In Mainland China, where there is no voting process and most people haven't even seen political banners yet, the work appeared controversial, and it has been consistently censored.

Roger Ng (www.noonhappyhour.com) is a photographer, a designer and a Tutor of Design and Visual Communication based in Hong Kong. In 2013, he established his own creative studio, noonhappyhour.

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Wong Ka Wing, Preserve.Image, 2013

Photographs, slideshow. Exhibited in the group exhibition "Excuse me, where is the market?", curated by Reds Cheung King-wai at Red Elation Gallery, Hong Kong (August 24 - September 21, 2013). More info

Opening streets to vehicular traffic and offering money to street vendors to surrender their stall licenses, Hong Kong is trying to remove the few remaining street markets. Red Elation Gallery invited five young, local artists to express their ideas on the local market. Intending to maintain the disappearing “market”, Wong Ka Wing took a series of abstracted photographs to reveal unseen values of the local market. According to John Batten, “Wong shoots the names of businesses operating in Graham Street market without a lens. The resulting images merely show graduations in colour, with the names having disappeared, which will soon be the fate of these businesses, too.” The photos were shown in printed form and as a slideshow on the MINI Museum.

Wong Ka Wing (born in Hong Kong in 1987) had his childhood in Guangzhou. He received his BA Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. Relations between people and social phenomenon are what his works are concerned about. Performance, conceptual work and photography are the media he uses.

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Susi Law, Chasing a Tree from Far, 2012

Digital images, slideshow. Exhibited at the attic of NEW KWONG TAI Dry Seafood Store in Hong Kong on Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Chasing a Tree from Far is a loop of six images in which Law used her camera lens to chase a tree until she lost it, found it and lost it again. The work is part of a series of minimal, poetic works in which the artist uses her camera to record fragments of reality or to explore behaviors of the device that suddenly got her attention.

Susi Law lives and works in Bergen, Norway, and is a master student in fine art at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Being surrounded by great nature and people makes her relate herself closer to the world in a natural way, sometimes she forgets about art/artist/exhibition-related stuff. Currently Susi cares more about her surroundings (people, space, nature) and pay very much attention to the relations in between. She treats wondering, reinterpreting, active listening, connecting and value-sniffing as her practices.

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Ellen Henriette Suhrke, Stone and Plastic, 2012

Digital images. Exhibited at the studio of Susi Law, Bergen, Norway on Monday December 3rd, 2012

Stone and Plastic documents four individuals in the process of moving a stone from its original position outside the forest cabin Hellebou and towards an unknown destination. Having no proper tools at hand, they are left with the materials that are given by the surroundings. Decaying tree trunks, thin ropes and a plastic sled. 

Hellebou is the last place that the MINI Museum was on display and later handed over to Suhrke. After presenting Stone and Plastic at the studio of Susi Law, the museum was handed over to the owner of the studio. 

Ellen Henriette Suhrke (b. 1984, Rana, Norway) lives and works in Bergen, Norway. She is about to complete an MFA at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Ellens works, ranging from video to photography and text, balance on the border between documentary and fiction. She focuses on traces of human interference with nature, often using everyday occurrences as her starting point. Ellen directs her attention towards specific sites, varying from the most familiar, to the most forren locations.

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Marijke Appelman, Nature Copies Us, 2012

Digital image. Exhibited at the Hellebou residency in Bolkesjø, Norway on Sunday October 28th, 2012

Nature Copies Us is a site specific intervention made on the occasion of Marijke Appelman's residency at Hellebou in Bolkesjø, Norway. Founded in 2009 by Johanne Birkeland and Ellen Henriette Suhrke, Hellebou is a traditional log cabin that functions as an artist residency, publishing house, and as a venue for exhibitions and live events. Since the initiative began, more than 50 artists have lived and worked in Hellebou, for a stay of their own chosen duration. The guests are encouraged to bring along a companion, and explore the surrounding fishing lakes, forest and mountain trails. During the residency period Marijke Appelman worked together with the Basel based artist Domenico Billari in the natural isolation that this cabin residency provides.

Nature Copies Us was produced in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and then transported to the cabin where it was temporarily installed. It is a digital picture featuring a close-up of the leaves of an ornamental plant, digitally manipulated to simulate a Rorschach Effect. The "fearful simmetry" of the image is stressed by the title of the work, which reverts the usual saying according to which art copies nature. The image has been displayed hanging the MINI Museum at a tree in the forest outside the cabin, where nature is confronted with itself.

Marijke Appelman (Born 1979 in Haarlem) lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her works are small gestures and ideas towards the appreciation of art and life. The works are simultaneously lyric and straightforward. Everyday situations and materials are used in installations, objects, performances and video resulting in an environmental art, but one whose environment is cultural instead of natural. 'Matières à réflexion', thought objects, is the title of an earlier series of works but fit Marijke Appelman's entire portfolio.

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Robbie Driessen, Appeltje, 2012

Video loop, 4.41’’. View the video (Youtube). Exhibited at Etalage Derde Wal in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on March 23, 2012

"Appeltje is a video I shot of a few years ago. At the time, I often sat at the drawing table, looking outside at a mostly empty park. One day this wheelchair powered man appeared."  Robbie Driessen

Robbie Driessen is an artist and curator based in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He runs the exhibition space Etalage Derde Wal, where Appeltje has been presented on March 23, 2012.

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Bertin van Vliet, Wallflower, 2011

Installation. Exhibited at Etalage Derde Wal in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on January 19, 2012

“I had the Mini Museum in my house for a while, with no inspiration what so-ever. Then I finaly came up with this idea of the wallflower. It was simple to come up with because I had allready made the wooden coloured blocks for something else.

I'm not to say which is the final work. The installation with the device, the digital image on the USB stick or the publication on the Mini Museum website.” Bertin van Vliet

Bertin van Vliet (1974) graduated from art-school with pop-art paintings of stylized Edison dolls and unrecognizable portraits of famous actors. Today Bertin is mostly active composing songs, recording lo-fi albums and doing solo-performances with electronic improvisation music. Bertin makes short-video's with still-photography and found-VHS-footage. In 2011 Bertin developed the casiophonic workshop.

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Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Stolen Artifact, 2011

Digital Video, 2:00 mins. View video (YouTube). Exhibited at Kotti-Shop, Berlin from June 25 to July 9, 2011. View documentation (Flickr)

Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage. «The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western museums and the communities which claim them – the artists explain – and it seemed fitting that we should provide the Mini Museum of XXI Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact. So we made a short “guerilla” film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin – itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are very keen to have returned. Beyond the idea that all “real” museums need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft, i.e. the “illegal” recording of an image against the orders of the institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image (postcards are, of course, on sale in the shop). As such Stolen Artifact is both a video of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned with entirely different question of ownership.»

Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson are based in Berlin and Manchester and have worked collaboratively since 1994. Their work is primarily concerned with the languages of power, with its grammar and with its rhetoric. Projects address questions around faith, politics, national identity and the environment. Their video and sculptural works create an encounter with the viewer that focuses on the complexity of objects and actions in relation to their social contexts. Works like The Fireworks, The Carriers' Prayer or The Four Horsemen operate though an unravelling of the social and ideological consequences of an action in regard to its apparent spectacle. This interest in consequence is reflected in the aesthetics of spectacle and excess that sit at the heart of their practice . Solo exhibitions include The Fireworks, Isolation Room, St Louis, 2011; No Sign of Helicopters, Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, 2010, The Carriers Prayer, Newlyn Art Gallery, 2009 and At 25 Metres, FACT, Liverpool, 2008. Group exhibitions include The Way We Do Art Now, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, 2010; Re-make/Re-model, National Glass Centre, Sunderland, 2010 – 2011; and Stranger Things are Happening, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, 2009.

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Martin John Callanan, Martin John Callanan is Okay, 2011.

Digital pictures, slideshow. Exhibited at Büro BDP (Emserstrasse 43, Berlin) from April 21 to May 5, 2011. View the documentation of the show (Flickr)

Since 2007, London based artist Martin John Callanan has linked his status updates across social networking sites to display messages in unison. The updates always read "Martin John Callanan is okay", with corresponding dates to show when they were published. 

The Web based project, still in progress, can be visited online at the URL http://okay.greyisgood.eu/. With its cold, simplified interface, the work links the contemporary habit, instigated by social networking sites, to keep one’s friends and followers updated about one’s status, with the conceptual practice to use art as a mean to record the flow of time, and to provide an objective documentation of one’s life. At the same time, however, its banal, never changing statement reduce to its minimum the function of status updates, which in the end only want to show that the communication channel is open and ready to be used.

Martin John Callanan is Okay has been adapted to the display features of the MINI Museum turning the 209 status updates collected up to now into an image slideshow displaying them sequentially in reverse chronological order.

Martin John Callanan is an artist and researcher exploring notions of citizenship within the globally connected world. His work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. It has included translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years. Martin's work has been exhibited, published and screened all around the world, at venues including: Es Baluard Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow International Film Festival, Ars Electronic Centre, ISEA 2010, Tate Britain. He is a Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

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Thomson & Craighead, Here, 2011.

Manipulated digital photograph and certificate of authenticity. Exhibited in the artist’s apartment View the documentation of the show (Flickr)

Here (2011), by Thomson & Craighead, is a site-specific intervention developed by the artists with the specific conditions of the MINI Museum in mind. It takes the shape of a digital photograph of a street sign displaying the text “Here 24, 859 >”. According to the Certificate of Authenticity provided by the artists together with the work, «When displaying this work, the MINI Museum should be physically installed along a North/South axis, so that the surface of the screen is running from North to South or South to North. This ensures that the information contained in this digital artwork is accurate and that the distance between the museum and here is almost exactly 24,859 miles at all times.»

Thus, Here can be described as a piece of institutional critique that turns the Museum into a statement about its own relativity in space. Being the MINI Museum a traveling institution, Here provides it with a fixed reference point, according to which it could be localized on the world map: the Museum can be everywhere, but it would always be 24,859 miles from “here”.

Furthermore, the piece describes the Museum as a “there”, and the “here” it points to as a mysterious, distant, fading “elsewhere”, moving as the Museum moves, but always 24,859 miles from it.

Thomson & Craighead (Jon Thomson, born 1969, and Alison Craighead, born 1971) are London-based visual artists, who work with video, sound and the internet. They have been working together since 1993. Much of their work to date explores how technology changes the way we perceive the world around us. They use live data to make artworks, including “template cinema online artworks” and gallery installations, where networked movies are created in real time from online material such as remote-user security web cams, audio feeds and chat room text transcripts.

Thomson lectures at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Craighead is currently Reader at the University of Westminster, and also lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Paul B. Davis, 01_Davis_Untitled_2010, 2010.

Digital photos, mp3 file. View the video (Vimeo). Exhibited in the toilet of Seventeen Gallery, London (March 2011) - View documentation (Flickr)

With 01_Davis_Untitled_2010, London-based artist Paul B. Davis appropriated and subverted the MINI Museum’s default screensaver, consisting of a slideshow of three landscape photographs. The artist took photos of the Museum when it displayed those demo images; then he made «a screwed and chopped remix of Manuel Göttsching's seminal proto-techno track E2-E4» (1984) and he copied both the track and the photos on the USB pen drive. The final result is almost identical to the behavior of the Museum in its “default” state, except for the soundtrack and some differences in the image quality which can be noticed on close inspection. With his minimal intervention, Davis turned the original screensaver - a beautiful example of the vernacular images displayed by default on consumer technologies, from computers to cell phones - into art, hinting back at appropriation art of the eighties in an absolutely modern, post internet fashion.

Paul B. Davis is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, where he lives and works. He pioneered the use of video game cartridges as an artistic medium and created the first hacked video game artworks. Together with Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckman and Joseph Bonn, he is a founding member of BEIGE, a multimedia programming collective and record label that released, in 2001, the incomparable 8-bit Construction Set, a kind of “MINI Museum on vinyl” featuring a selection of demos, songs and software for Commodore 64 and Atari.