| Description | According to the organisers, "the WRO Media Art Biennale is the leading international forum for new media art in Poland and Central Europe." For the 2011 edition, a total of 2478 works were submitted from around the world, from which ca. 70 works have been selected for the biennale (success rate < 3%). The exhibition has attracted over 40,000 visitors.
Exit-Wall is a modular installation comprising hundreds of illuminant exit signs assembled by means of permanent magnets. Usually the signs are used in public spaces to indicate, in case of emergency, an escape route to the outside. By contrast, Cécile Colle and Ralf Nuhn are employing the exit signs like bricks of a wall to build a barrier within a space. For the artists, the paradoxical nature of this assemblage – originating from the contradiction between the linguistic meaning of its constituting parts (the exit signs) and the physical obstacle it poses in reality – evokes the inherent ambiguities of different limits in ‘real life’: architectural, political, cultural, psychological, technological...
The project relates strongly to Colle and Nuhn’s continuous research about the new (im)possibilities of exchange proposed by technology. In particular, their work revolves around the inherent ambiguity of the interface, providing both access to new territories and simultaneously separating us from other parts of reality. Like an interface, Exit-Wall “promises” an exit, an access to the other side but at the same time constitutes a physical separation.
Due to the modular, magnetic assemblage of the “bricks”, the construction of the wall can be staged as a performance lasting about 30mins. A video featuring the performative construction Exit-Wall has been produced for the BBC Big Screen network and was inaugurated at the BBC Big Screen in Dover in the context of the exhibition From A to B (curator: Christine Gist) in September 2010.
The Exit-Wall installation has also been shown at:
Kinetica Art Fair, Ambika P3, London, Februaury 2011 (over 10,000 visitors).
Pixxelpoint - New Media Festival, City Gallery, Nova Gorica/Slovenia, December 2010.
Both events have produced catalogs featuring Exit-Wall.
A “work-in-progress” version of Exit-Wall (Exit Wall – The sky is the limit) was shown in a solo exhibition in September 2009 at the Bureau d’Art et de Recherche - BAR #2, Roubaix/France.
Images of Exit-Wall have featured in numerous online reviews and articles and a large photo was used to illustrate a TLS review of Jaron Lanier’s book “You are not a gadget” in February 2011. |
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