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Volksteller, 1971
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Janina Frye - Blue Morpho, 2021
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Paysage artificiel, 1960
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For the exhibition Bridging Borders, P–OST invites three artists who focus their work and practice on the relationships between machines or technology and humans. In Bridging Borders the works of the participating artists are placed in the context of Constant’s ideas about the future. The central question in the exhibition is to what extent automation, machines and technology give people freedom or captivity when they become more and more intertwined.
Involved partners
For Bridging Borders, P–OST was inspired by the idea of a world without borders, as it is central to the New Babylon project by Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005). As a platform operating in a border area, they would like to take this idea to heart and strive to break through the borders. In this case specifically between the Netherlands and Germany. That is why P–OST invites a mix of German and German based artists for Bridging Borders.
In Bridging Borders, not only national borders are questioned or eliminated. The artists and works of art have been specifically selected for their focus on the relationship between man and machine.
In New Babylon, in addition to the borderless world, Constant also sketches a future world in which man is liberated from labor through automation. All selected works of art are in one way or another related to the (possible) impact of technology, automation or the mixing of man and machine. We invited art historian Tessa Kalsbeek to write a contextualizing text on how Constant’s ideas relate to the artworks presented and the ideas they put forward.
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Photo’s Floris de Vries
BRIDGING BORDERS | MAN/MACHINE
Text by Tessa Kalsbeek for Bridging Borders, February 2022
New Babylon means boundlessness in the broadest sense of the word. A city where utility/usefulness no longer dominates human action (“Technology can free us from the tyranny of work, release us from the duty ‘to earn our daily bread by sweat”[4]) and freedom is within reach (“technique can conquer distance and time”[5]), creates endless possibilities. A city made up of countless sectors (traffic independent of buildings), where machines run factories far away from the New Babylonians and in which people collectively achieve artistic creation in large socio-spaces: that is how Constant saw the future. A world with minimal frameworks; the realization of this was in the hands of the coming generations.
Fast-forward to 2022. Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives: the products we use are made by machines, we communicate with the help of machines, consume media via machines and sometimes even become one with (medical) machines. Is this New Babylon then?
