DiMoDA @ Onassis ONX
DiMoDa @ Onassis ONX
DiMoDA 4.0: Dis/Location Opening Reception and Exhibition Tour
Thursday, September 21, 6-8PMDiMoDA 4.0: Dis/Location Public Hours
September 22-24 & 28-30 from 12-6PM“Spirit and Child” by LaJuné McMillian
Performances: September 22, 7PM & September 30, 6PM
DiMoDA is proud to present the New York premiere of its 4th exhibition: Dis/Location at Onassis ONX. Curated by Christiane Paul, Dis/Location addresses the feeling of displacement from or disturbance of a proper, original, or usual place that has become a defining experience of our time. The projects explore issues from gentrification and evolution to perceptions of space afforded by technologies. Users explore displacement from neighborhoods; the shifts occurring in the evolution of the earth from its creation to the Anthropocene; as well as our communication with the binary operations of computers.
DiMoDA 4.0 Features the works of Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Banz & Bowinkel and Tamiko Thiel. Architecture design by Ayman Tawfeeq and Alfredo Salazar Caro. DiMoDA’s Onassis ONX program will also feature a series of talks as well as performances by LaJuné McMillian.
More about the curators & artists:
Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita, School of Media Studies, The New School. At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Refigured (2023), Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art.
Ayman Tawfeeq is an architectural designer at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates focused on developing complex master plans internationally in south East Asia and China. Ayman designs with a sensible, contextual and socially driven approach. He communicates ideas and architecture strategies through technology including animation, illustration, and virtual reality experiences. He collaborated with DiMoDA to create a VR museum which investigates social issues around immigration and dislocation, while also reflecting on his own displacement story as an immigrant moving from Iraq to USA during the war.
Tamiko Thiel received the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award for (now) over 35 years of media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity in political and socially critical artworks. Her visual design of Danny Hillis' Connection Machine CM1/CM2 (1986/1987) expressed the inner mysteries of this first AI supercomputer, now in the collection of MoMA NY. Her VR artwork Beyond Manzanar (2000, with Zara Houshmand) immersed users in the experiences of Japanese Americans and Iranian Americans as "the face of the enemy," and was acquired by the San Jose Museum of Art in 2002. Her AR work Unexpected Growth (2018, with /p) planted a virtual plastic garbage coral reef on the 6th floor terrace of the Whitney Museum of American Art and is in the museum's collection, and her AR installation ReWildAR (2021, with /p) creates a wildflower meadow complete with symbiotic pollinating insects for the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th anniversary.
Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz generate scenarios of the juxtaposition of nature, texture, body and space, mass, form and substance. The artist duo generates reflective moments that shift between moving images, virtual sculptures and snapshots. Technological tools that have become an integral part of contemporary society serve as source and material – the computer becomes a tool and the interactions with it the subject of their work. The human being free in his choice and with his computer technological possibilities (as a subject and as an avatar) form again and again a reference point when generating forms in the visual (re)-construction of diversity and the digital image of what presents itself as {real}.
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, an awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. The ways that inequality and power manifest themselves in our lives are consistent threads in Ricardo's work. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of monetization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives.
LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJuné believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being.