Exhibition: Antennae — Frequencies from the Archive

Antennae — Frequencies from the Archive

18.7.-24.11.2024 in the ZKM

Curated by: Nick Aikens and Céline Condorelli (HfG Karlsruhe) in dialogue with Felix Mittelberger (ZKM)

With: Bettina Bessenyei, Lena Breitmoser, Athina Chrisofakis, Senta Hirscheider, Jungwon Jang, Philipp Kern, Chaeyoung Moon, Lasse Peters, Elisabeth Potemkin, Yijing Zhang

Curatorial assistance: Janina Hilberer

Technical project management: Anne Däuper

Photos taken by: Philipp Kern and Lena Breitmoser

Antennae: Frequencies from the Archive was developed with the seminar Antennae to feel-think-know in the department of exhibition design and scenography (ADSZ) at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG).

Antennae are sensory organs that animals use to look and feel. In communication antennae are used to send signals between a transistor and a receiver. This exhibition is approached as both a sensory and communication antennae to emit different frequencies – sounds, images, and messages – emanating from the ZKM archive. These frequencies are produced by fragments of experimental music, science fiction, video art and are modlated by the body as well as the space of the exhibition itself. They are invitations to listen, watch, read and feel.

The ZKM archive, with its more than 200 archival estates, offers a vast collection of documents, but also of audio-visual media and artworks, that together chart a geography of New Media Art. It is an archive that constantly looks to the future through new technologies but it is also grappling with the past as these technologies become obsolete. This exhibition explores how two technologies in particular – the Sony Portapak video recorder and the sound modulator Vocoder– opened up new approaches to the present and the future, here through the video works by the Raindance Foundation, Videofreex and Antonis Muntadas, as well as the experimental sound practice of Suzanne Ciani. Elsewhere, early science-fiction magazines published in the U.S. by Hugo Gernsback are dissected to allow insights to how the future was projected, in a particular past. Archives themselves are always incomplete, partial and malleable: the stories they tell depend on what has been included in the archive as well as what has been left out. The exhibition makes this partiality explicit through the example of the US sci-fi magazine Science and Invention, which was published by Hugo Gernsback from the 1920s onwards. The manipulated images showing only human figures and highlight the vast gender inequality of the future forecasting. The exhibition also foregrounds perspectives that seem underrepresented or absent from the archive, including the pioneering work of women artists and authors (Annegret Soltau, Suzanne Ciani and a host of female science fiction writers), queer perspectives (Pauline Oliveros and Gay Video Workshop) and antiracist struggles (a message from Black Panther Charles Pinderhughes to the Videocommunity and the Goddard Media Conference). In thisway the exhibition offers frequencies of a possible archive to come.