NOISE _____ 09.12.2022 – 17.12.2022

R52L Kunstraum, Berlin, DE

Noise, in its purest form, is the collapse of distinction, between figure and ground, signal and silence, truth and fiction. Noise provides unwanted information in digital images. It creates artefacts, unrealistic edges, invisible lines, corners, blurred objects. In other words, unwanted information in digital images. Noise is chaos. A cacophony of events that the human brain does not want to recognise. The word noise emerged at the end of the 19th century to describe interference caused by signal transmission over long distances. Digital noise equals image noise equals media noise.

In war, this noise is not accidental—it is a technique. The image of violence, endlessly repeated, pixelated, blurred, denatured, becomes a form of governance. It does not seek to inform but to condition. We are no longer called to witness but to scroll. In this way, noise becomes a political category. It is the threshold condition through which the exception becomes the rule. Like the homo sacer (Agamben) the subject of the war image exists in a zone of indistinction: no longer fully visible, no longer entirely hidden. Reduced to signal and interference.

In this exhibition, artists work to reproduce the human perception of the information noise we see during war. In the 21st century, chaos replaces enlightenment, noise replaces information. Where nothing can be heard and identified as true, everything can be talked about. In the age of informational excess, to see is no longer to know. Clarity is a fiction, and noise is the new condition of subjectivity.

Text by Guido Walter and Sofiia Yesakova

Curated by Sued Blankenburg

Duo exhibition with artist Minor Alexander

Installation view alongside Minor Aleksander’s works

Cargo 200. Experimental projections on surfaces. 1.3., 30 × 30 × 3 cm, Acrylic, gesso and wood board, 2022

War landscape in the optic of icons. Instant 3.1., 40 × 40 × 5 cm, Acrylic, gelatin, gesso and wooden board, 2022