Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Untitled (2021)
courtesy KW Institute for Contemporary Art
There have been plenty of innovations in the digital realm over the past year (indeed, one of the boons of lockdown is the expansion of the virtual world and the ensuing wave of illuminating digital offerings). The KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin is pushing the digital envelope big time with its new exhibition The Last Museum (until 6 June) curated by Nadim Samman, curator for digital sphere (disclosure: Dr Samman also used to write for The Art Newspaper). The online show includes works by artists such as Nora Al-Badri, Nicole Foreshew and Juliana Cerqueira Leite. “Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at a physical site of their own choosing,” says Samman in a statement. The end result “is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. Visitors may have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts,” he adds. Leite’s objects were installed in Santa Ifigênia, an area known for its electronics retail outlets in downtown São Paulo. Entering the space feels unsettling but invigorating—look out for the disembodied mouth and the “replacement of the website cursor with the artist’s own finger, dipped in plaster—a motif that gives another sense to the digit within the digital”, quips Samman.
