Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →

 
A man with a beard wearing a reptile leather jacket (GmbH) and a striped shirt.

jacket: GmbH, shirt: Theo’s own

 

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.

Bernhard Buhmann's 'My Automatic Me' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.

Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie

Jon Rafman's Insane Ultra-Futuristic Major Solo Exhibition At the Zabludowicz Collection in London

For his first major solo exhibition in the UK, Canadian artist Jon Rafman has transformed the spaces of the Zabludowicz Collection into a playful series of new installations that immerse visitors within his video and sculptural works. Emerging from his interest in the relationship between technology and human consciousness, Rafman’s works examine ideas of desire – its simulation and enactment. The exhibition will be on view at the Zabludowicz Collection until December 20, 2015. photographs by Thierry Bal