Juliana Cerqueira Leite

POETICS OF ENCRYPTION

KW, BERLIN, 17 February - 26 May 2024- group exhibithion

POETICS OF ENCRYPTION

Though we rely on digital tools for many things, we rarely understand how they work. Moreover, due to the proprietary nature of much corporate tech, even the most curious among us cannot gain deeper insight. Today, we are forced to come to terms with our relative lack of power in the face of inscrutable systems. What symptoms of this personal and political drama register in the cultural field? What moods, symbols, or narrative frames capture the aesthetics and politics of exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, and speculation concerning technology’s inside? This extensive group exhibition at KW builds upon the recent book by Nadim Samman titled Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene. It surveys an imaginative landscape marked by Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes—terms that indicate how technical systems capture users, how they work in stealth, and how they distort cultural space-time. These themes form the basis three chapters that play out across all gallery floors at KW. Spanning analogue and digital media, Poetics of Encryption features both historic and newly commissioned works by more than 40 international artists.

Featuring artists: Nora Al-Badri, Morehshin Allahyari*, American Artist*, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Gillian Brett, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Julian Charrière, Joshua Citarella, Clusterduck, Juan Covelli, Kate Crawford, Sterling Crispin, Simon Denny, enorê, Roger Hiorns, Tilman Hornig, Rindon Johnson, Vladan Joler, Daniel Keller, Andrea Khôra, Jonna Kina, Oliver Laric, Eva & Franco Mattes, Jürgen Mayer H., Most Dismal Swamp, NEW MODELS, Carsten Nicolai, Simone C Niquille, Trevor Paglen, Matthias Planitzer, Jon Rafman, Rachel Rossin, Sebastian Schmieg, Charles Stankievech, Troika, UBERMORGEN, Nico Vascellari, Zheng Mahler, among others. The exhibition architecture has been made in collaboration with architect Jürgen Mayer H. / J. MAYER H. and partners, architects. A dedicated website-as-catalogue also features three ‘web-first’ artistic commissions, rich media, and a bespoke AI chatbot.

Curator: Nadim Samman

Assistant Curator: Linda Franken

Curatorial Assistant: Lara Scherrieble

——is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Nicholas of Cusa

We rely on digital tools for many things, yet rarely understand how they work. Gaining deeper insight is not always an option. First, due to the proprietary nature of much corporate tech. Second, because understanding how an advanced AI came to generate a particular output can be impossible. Such ignorance and lack of power with respect to encrypted systems is difficult to endure. How does this situation register in art?

This group exhibition builds upon the recent publication Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene by Nadim Samman. It explores the crypt in encryption, surveying an imaginative landscape marked by Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes. These terms indicate how emerging tech captures users; how it works in secret; and how it distorts cultural space-time. Three chapters showcase these themes, across all gallery floors at KW. Throughout, the exhibition toggles between enlightened concern and occult dreaming.

Each chapter proposes an imaginative model for where an intelligent, embodied human is placed in relation to the realm of digital secrets and hidden mechanisms. The artworks gathered under the heading Black Site explore the state of being locked in: captured or contained, buried in a technological grave. Black Box explores how artists picture the state of being intellectually locked out of ubiquitous consumer and industrial products. Finally, Black Hole considers how super-dense digital archives and/or computational processes scramble distinctions between inside and outside (locked down), before and after, sense and nonsense.

In the latent space between exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, questing, and speculation concerning technology’s inside, there unfolds an emergent poetic of encryption.

This exhibition features new and historic works spanning analogue and digital media by over 40 international artists. They are set within an architecture by Jürgen Mayer H. / J. MAYER H. and partners, architects. Additionally, a website serves as the project’s digital gallery and catalogue. It features three ‘web-first’ artistic commissions, rich media, a bespoke AI chatbot, and further project documentation.

Exhibition works