1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia
February - May 2020. Solo show curated by Park C. Myers.
1708 is pleased to present Proximal, Distal, Adrift, an exhibition of new work by Liliana Farber. This exhibition will be comprised of autonomous software, performance documentation, video, mobile applications, prints, and text. Farber looks to cartographic histories, storytelling, and machine learning algorithms to develop novel under standings of how contemporary culture engages with data at scales that are human, global, and computational. Proximal, Distal, Adrift inquires: How does internet infrastructure perform and for whom? How does navigation online remain personal (human) while happening through biased algorithmic networks and operating on un known servers? How do information technologies insinuate trust and validate truth?
The platforms and infrastructures that shape the media landscape are also the site of Farber’s artistic practice and output. She uses Google Earth and machine learning networks as sources for navigation and manipulation in the video work Anonymous and the digital print series Terram in Aspectu. A custom smartphone application, Blue Vessel, invites visitors to write anonymous stories by selecting words from Robinson Crusoe. And an autonomous server, located at 1708, send a signal to random servers across the planet –adrift across fiber optic cables–awaiting response to be logged by a thermal printer throughout the exhibition’s duration. Adrift is a performance between machines taking place in the underground channels of internet infrastructure. Proximal, Distal, Adrift unveils the geopolitics, colonialism, and capitalist endeavors that big data and machine intelligence covertly embrace.
Proximal, Distal, Adrift does not eschew the human subject; the title references the very human body that is affected by these technologies. Proximal and distal in anatomy refer to the distance of something to the center of the body –is it nearer or farther? Adrift is unattached and unsupervised, leaving all three parts in a flux of relative location and connection.
Center for Book Arts, NYC
April - June 2022. Curated by Anthony Tino and Shahar Kramer.
Participating artists: Michael Rakowitz; Mina Shoaib; Hardworking Goodlooking; Jumbo; Matjaž Tančič; Mindy Seu; Betsy Damon; Liliana Farber; Irmak Canevi & Marie von Heyl; Abie Franklin; T. Shanaathanan; Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, & Zeng Xiaojun.
Anthony Tino and Shahar Kramer curated the work of fifteen artists for the exhibition Beyond Codex: Living Archives, which envisions archiving as a method to reimagine the potential of publishing. The exhibition focuses on strategies of the artist as researcher, highlighting the importance of archives and archiving as records of history, and as evolving spaces for inquiry and discourse.
As a beginning, rather than an end, the living archive extends the notion of its application beyond a preservational position; rethinking the power structures of the archival system and its presumed authority as an institution of itself.
Beyond Codex: Living Archives is a meditation on the crossing and diverging pathways between personal narratives and public records, as well as the notion of accessibility within organized systems. From family records to online indexes, Beyond Codex includes works that challenge the conventions of publishing and archiving, while generating needed space for often-times under-recognized cultural heritage and texts.
MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal
October 2019 - January 2020. Group show curated by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli.
Inner Space is part of an ongoing research project into the construction of the architectural imagination. It sets out to investigate the space between the inner and outer realities, a space that could be inhabited and explored in itself, looking for those moments in which the two realms interact most vividly. Besides, it also identifies two parallel and strictly intertwined movements intervening in the construction of architectural imagination: a collective one and an individual one, two spheres complementing each other. The aim is to identify imagination as an immersive territory that can be experienced, crossed and even inhabited, defined as a human ability which partly relies on a collective process. This collective moment in the construction of the imagination intertwines with an individual one, developed by each author. Inner Space also identifies how architectural imagination is capable of nourishing other disciplines: from art to videogames, virtual reality, comic books and forensic investigations.
The architectural design process usually starts with the identification of a number of ideas and mental images, which are translated into a series of documents (sketches, working models and drawings). This process does not resume each time a new project begins, instead relies on a lifelong construction of imagination fed by a casual voluntary relationship between the author and a field of images and concepts over a long time. Architects drew their inner space, constructing inventive means to connect the outer world and inner realm of their mind. The exhibition looks behind the curtains of the design process, questioning how the cognitive process of imagination unfolds and how it gets translated into a work of architecture, by identifying two parallel and strictly intertwined movements in the construction of imagination: a collective and an individual one.