forking paths | group show

With Channa Horwitz, Brigitte Kowanz, Jenna Sutela and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, forking paths unites four artists for the first time whose mutual interest lies in the connection between art and technology. In historical and recent works, this group exhibition demonstrates their central engagement with codes, data, patterns and language, which each of them interpret and transform individually, sometimes creating distinct systems. 

This viewing room foregrounds the four individual artistic positions and offers an insight into the artists' practices beyond the works in the exhibition. Please click on the works for further information, texts and photos.

The exhibition was realized in collaboration with Lisson Gallery from London, New York, and Shanghai and Embajada from Puerto Rico.

Jenna Sutela (*1983 in Turku, FI) uses biological and computational systems to create audio-visual works, sculptures, images and performance art. Working with artificial neuronal networks or bacteria and with the help of her own systems and algorithms, the artist uncovers patterns and meanings that are hidden in disorder. With her collaborative approach she points to decentralised organisation, she questions social hierarchy, broaches the issue of communication between species and the connection of awareness and the material world. Her procedural works are based on latest scientific research and reflect its social-political impact. Sutela's work promotes the idea of a symbiotic network and the renunciation of an anthropocentric world. Her oeuvre illustrates that man does not exist in a void, but in symbiotic ecosystems with bacteria, mould, computers and many other elements, some of which remain incomprehensible.

Sutela's work has been shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2019), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2022) at the Liverpool Biennial (2021), Shanghai Biennale (2021), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2019), and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2018), among others.


Installation view NO NO NSE NSE, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2020) | Photo: Aage A. Mikalsen

"The key to my work is simplicity and complexity. I have been working with the premise that any complexity can be understood in it's simplest form; that all diverse fields are in some way similar. in my notations I am interested in breaking through the barrier of the different arts, because they all have a common language."

– Channa Horwitz

Channa Horwitz | Copyright Estate of Channa Horwitz | Photo: Ellen Davis

The series of works Sonakinatography, which Channa Horwitz developed in the 1960s and continued until her death, includes a large number of drawings on graph paper based on 23 compositions. The artist uses color, symbols, word or numbers which can be translated into sequences of movement, sound, or spoken words in a rigorous order and based on the number eight. The numbers are often assigned a specific color code. The title of the graphic and minimalist notations derives from the Greek words for "sound" (sona), "movement" (kineto), and "notation" (graphe), and enabled Horwitz to visualize time, rhythm, and movement of bodies and objects in space. 

Channa Horwitz' works were part of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2014. In 1970 she was included as the only female position with a project proposal in the catalog of the well-known Art and Technology program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Works by the artist have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018), Kunsthalle Wien (2016), Itaú Cultural in São Paulo (2015), Museum Tinguely in Basel (2015), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015) and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2013) and Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles (2012), among others.

"[...] Torres Ferrer's work interrupts any lasting perception that the virtual is separate from lived experience, or that technology is waste-free."

– Meghana Karnik (Kuratorin und Autorin)

Photo: Gabriella Torres-Ferrer

The round wall objects 123 (2011) and 456789 (2011) made of satin stainless steel and neon lamps give the impression of convex and concave shapes merging into each other – in reality this is an illusion created only by the neon light. The tubes are divided into segments and their light is thrown in a ring onto the metal surface. Kowanz chose the order of the segments accordingly to the morse alphabet, realizing that this binary code serves both as carrier of information and facilitator of language – it translates the numerals in the titles into segments of light. 123 and 456789 seem to be rotating luminescent sculptures that radiate their sequences of numbers seemingly endlessly into the surrounding space. Since the late 1980s, Kowanz had frequently combined light with characters and linguistic codes to visualize the complex relationship between seeing and understanding, perception and recognition. Light becomes both material and information carrier at the same time, not only illuminating but also generating meaning as an independent phenomenon similar to language and writing: "Morse code is comprised of elementary forms: lines and dots, circles and rectangles, short and long. [...] It is a very minimal language, which all the same can represent any kind of complexity. The information transfer takes place in the space between on and off, light and shadow."

"What interests me about language is that it creates or constructs reality, just as light makes it visible. Therein lies a proximity that explains why both often occur in parallel or redundantly and tautologically in my works. By bringing them together, they make each other visible."

– Brigitte Kowanz