March 16 | Kayla Anderson, Femke Herregraven and Melanie Bonajo | Bots, Bodies, Beasts - The art of being Humble

Program with Kayla Anderson, Femke Herregraven and Melanie Bonajo & Beamclub screening March 16 at 13.30 hrs at RIETVELD'S GYM Fred Roeskestraat 96

ETHICS, ECOLOGY, AND THE FUTURE: ART AND DESIGN FACE THE ANTHROPOCENE KAYLA ANDERSON In the spirit of Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, this talk examines how Anthropocene-themed art and design can act as a testing-ground for the development of new ethics, politics, and philosophies of the Anthropocene. By looking at several contemporary art and speculative design projects, we will explore what effects Anthropocene-themed narratives developing in the art world might have on the discourse as a whole.

ROBOTIC ARMS, CRABS AND ALGOS FEMKE HERREGRAVEN How do we as humans beings relate to and navigate in the new value systems, material realities and geographies sub second machine ecologies that financial logic carves out? In this talk Herregraven will discuss her work and practice in which she makes links between trading algorithms and melting ice, latency and trees, panic and submarine cables in order to reflect on the material and daily consequences of global finance.

PROGRESS VS. REGRESS MELANIE BONAJO Photographer, filmmaker and performance artist Melanie Bonajo will elaborate on Progress vs. Regress, a film about how technological innovations have changed social relations.The film documents the effect of the most influential inventions, what is important in life and how humans are shaped by these inventions.

Kayla Anderson is an artist, writer, and organizer based in Chicago, USA. Using a playful approach to methods of excavation, her work engages with cultural artifacts of the past in order to propose parallel worlds. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries, and itinerant spaces in the US and abroad. Her writing has been published by Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), The Royal College of Art, and MU Art Space, Eindhoven (NL), and presented at SIGGRAPH, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the UCSB, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds the position of Manager of Library Special Collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curates exhibitions, lectures, and mentors students in the history, theory, and creation of artists’ publications. In her spare time, she organizes a monthly critique group for feminist media makers called Media Grrrl.

In her work Femke Herregraven explores which new material base, geographies and value systems contemporary financial technologies and infrastructures carve out. Works exist online and as drawings, prints, sculptures, video and installations. Her work has been presented at Dark Ecology, Serpentine Marathon, Transmediale and recently exhibited at T293 (Rome) Bureau Europa, (Maastricht) V&A (London) Witte de With (Rotterdam) Centre Pompidou (Paris) SMBA (Amsterdam) Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Carroll / Fletcher (London) and Future Gallery (Berlin). She currently lives and works in Amsterdam.

Melanie Bonajo examines the paradoxes inherent in ideas of comfort. Through her videos, performances, photographs and installations, Bonajo examines subjects related to progress that remove from the individual a sense of belonging and looks at how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation within the individual. Captivated by concepts of the divine, she explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by looking at our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, gender and attitudes towards value. Bonajo's work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions, such as De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Moscow Bienniale; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul and PPOW Gallery, New York and her films have played in festivals such as International Documentary Filmfestival (IDFA), Amsterdam and Berlinale. In 2012 she initiated the collective Genital International which tackles subjects around feminism, participation, equality, our Earth, ‘Politics beyond Polarity’ and ‘Revolution through Relaxation.' She wrote for several art magazines, was creative editor of Capricious magazine and curated shows such like the QQC performance festival about pop music in visual arts at the Paradiso, Amsterdam. She published several books including: Modern Life of the Soul, I Have a Room with Everything, Spheres and Furniture Bondage. In 2013 she released an album with her band ZaZaZoZo called Inua.