At Borderline Art Space, the exhibition “World of Details. With or Against the Trend – Contemporary Photographic Interventions” opens on Wednesday, March 11, at 6:00 PM. The show is a solo exhibition by Viktoria Binschtok, curated by Christin Müller and Florian Ebner.
“In her series World of Details, Viktoria Binschtok combines views of New York from Google Street View with close-ups she has taken on-site as a means to confront the automated images of the Google universe with her own subjective impressions of the same urban reality.
The pictures from the series Three People on the Phone were taken in Tokyo in 2004, a few years before smartphones began to completely define our public life. The work was edited by the artist in 2007 and, as such, her images already convey a sense of the degree to which these small devices would completely revolutionize our attention economics.
Viktoria Binschtok’s Clusters explore the relationship between images that are based only on the results produced by the algorithms of a Google image search for “similar images”. The starting point for each group is an image from Binschtok’s private archive, which she feeds into the search engine. The artist selects a number of images from the pictures found on the Internet and restages them in the studio.” (curatorial text)
Viktoria Binschtok (b. 1972, Moscow) connects the real world of the streets with its representation in digital spheres to show us how images on the internet no longer merely reflect our world, but rather create one of their own. In her work she makes equal use of both her own photographs and images from the internet and other media sources that are increasingly dominated by digital algorithms.
The artist exploits the randomness of these new image formats and playfully challenges their potential. With this artistic approach she provides insights into the paradoxes and distortions of this new image order, even though it is an order that follows mathematical and economic principles. Binschtoks works represent a new generation of artists today who are extending the notion of photography and its documentary potential by addressing the increasing autonomy of images in a networked world. She is living in Berlin.
