2014–2021: Independent Curatorial Projects (Selection)
FRANCIS RUYTER
Hurricane / Time / Image
11/4/2019—9/5/2019
The exhibition Hurricane/Time/Image reroutes a new line of understanding around Francis Ruyter’s painting practice by sandwiching his new works with a flash retrospective of his germinal work from the 1990s. Curated by Mohammad Salemy, it will consist of drawings, paintings and objects, dated from 1990–94 and 2015–19 as well as new display treatments including projections and reproductions of the archival source material. The project takes place at Franz Josefs Kai 3, an exhibition space programmed parallel to the Angewandte Innovation Lab, a program of the University of the Applied Arts in Vienna Austria.
Hurricane/Time/Image is meant to disrupt narratives of artistic, aesthetic and career developments as well as social conditions surrounding the production of art and subjectivity specific to Ruyter. It suggests that the chaotic force of technology is always at work throughout an artist’s oeuvre, rearranging the relationship of past, present and future into new constellations. Rather than using the recent works to make a new sense out of Ruyter’s earlier practice, it brings to light embedded concerns, themes and motifs which have been resonating in the artist’s practice since the early stages of his career.
The new works are derived from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) digital archive at the Library of Congress with which Ruyter has been working to various effects since 2009, focusing in this body of work on photographs he has found using the search keyword “machine.” This particular filtering of the archive highlights how the artist’s thoughts on machines—physical, biological, virtual and social—have informed his oeuvre since his drawings and paintings from the early 1990s.
While the older works signal the transformation of the analog media to digital and the persistence of older technologies of presentation and modeling embedded in digital technologies, the newer works go even further by investigating the abstract, geometric and, essentially, inhuman essence of representation as well as highlighting the role of algorithmic epistemologies which underpin the emergence of neural networks, machine learning and machinic vision. The exhibition showcases Ruyters’ visionary outlook towards the connections between art and media technologies, insisting on the primary role of painting in meditating their similarities and differences.
Hurricane/Time/Image is meant to disrupt narratives of artistic, aesthetic and career developments as well as social conditions surrounding the production of art and subjectivity specific to Ruyter. It suggests that the chaotic force of technology is always at work throughout an artist’s oeuvre, rearranging the relationship of past, present and future into new constellations. Rather than using the recent works to make a new sense out of Ruyter’s earlier practice, it brings to light embedded concerns, themes and motifs which have been resonating in the artist’s practice since the early stages of his career.
The new works are derived from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) digital archive at the Library of Congress with which Ruyter has been working to various effects since 2009, focusing in this body of work on photographs he has found using the search keyword “machine.” This particular filtering of the archive highlights how the artist’s thoughts on machines—physical, biological, virtual and social—have informed his oeuvre since his drawings and paintings from the early 1990s.
While the older works signal the transformation of the analog media to digital and the persistence of older technologies of presentation and modeling embedded in digital technologies, the newer works go even further by investigating the abstract, geometric and, essentially, inhuman essence of representation as well as highlighting the role of algorithmic epistemologies which underpin the emergence of neural networks, machine learning and machinic vision. The exhibition showcases Ruyters’ visionary outlook towards the connections between art and media technologies, insisting on the primary role of painting in meditating their similarities and differences.