Conversations on Experimental Artistic Mediums

On 23 February 2023 at 10 a.m., on the occasion of Arcomadrid Art Fair, Ivorypress hosted ‘Conversations on Experimental Artistic Mediums’, an event which brought together artists Tomás Saraceno and Christian Marclay, and curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yuval Etgar.

Yuval Etgar is an art historian and curator, specialising in the history and theory of collage and image appropriation. He holds a PhD from the Ruskin School of art, University of Oxford, and is currently acting as Director of Research and Exhibitions at Luxembourg + Co. gallery, as well as Adjunct Curator at the Bauhaus Foundation, Tel Aviv. Notable recent publications and exhibitions include Phaidon’s survey ‘Vitamin C+ Collage in Contemporary Art’, ‘Louise Nevelson: Out of Order’, ‘John Stezaker: At the Edge of Pictures’, and ‘The Ends of Collage’.

Christian Marclay is a visual artist and composer. Marclay’s work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages. His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop’s use of the instrument. Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Okkyung Lee. One of his most hypnotic pieces is ‘The Clock’, which opened in London in 2012. The concept was straightforward and the work herculean: to splice together film scenes displaying clocks into a full 24-hour piece. His work is now on view in a solo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, France.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup’ (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include ‘Ways of Curating’ (2015), ‘The Age of Earthquakes’ (2015), ‘Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects’ (2015), ‘Mondialité’ (2017), ‘Somewhere Totally Else’ (2018) ‘The Athens Dialogues’ (2018), ‘Maria Lassnig: Letters’ (2020), ‘Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2’ (2020), and ‘140 Ideas for Planet Earth’ (2021).

Tomás Saraceno is an Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist whose projects dialogue with forms of life and life-forming, rethinking dominant threads of knowledge and recognizing how diverse modes of being engage a multiplicity of vibrations on the Web of Life. For more than two decades, Saraceno has worked with local communities, scientific researchers, and institutions around the world, and has activated open-source, interdisciplinary, collective projects, including ‘Museo Aero Solar’ (2007), the ‘Aerocene Foundation’ (2015),  and ‘Arachnophilia’, towards a society free from carbon emissions, for interspecies climate justice.