conversas25

Adrien Missika (1981, Paris) lives and works in Berlin. Through a wide array of mediums, which range from photography and video, to sculpture and installations, Adrien Missika records various places around the world. Like an anachronic traveling painter, Missika blurs the line between documentation and fiction. He defies and plays with the populist imagery rooted in our collective memory and, with a humoristic turn, opens up new readings. His experimental approach to photography and video, maybe his most recurring mediums, results in the nomadic documentation of non-places, unstable landscapes, ruins or biotopes that evoke a strange futuristic nostalgia. Even the very passing of time becomes a formal technique, used by the artist to expand perception. Through his installations and sculptures, Missika evokes in the spectator visualizations and atmospheres that with their narratives, invert clichés and hierarchies of representations.

Yung-shan Tsou is a Berlin based Taiwanese artist whose work involves handwriting and bookmaking as conceptual expressions. She considers perceptual differences between reading words and viewing pictures. Her current work, Our Gaze, is to discover how reading changes in the contemporary context.

Based in Berlin, American artist Elizabeth McTernan performs research over land and sea, processing it through actions, installation, drawing, printmaking, text, and artist’s books. She exhibits internationally and has been invited as an artist-in-residence at numerous reputable institutions across Europe and the US. During Conversas McTernan will share 'Seeing Things' an interdisciplinary research project conducted in the Arctic during the summer solstice. The phrase “seeing things” is about literal physical observation, while it is also about seeing what is not really there, the hallucination of objective representation – like our eyes tricking us when we try to see in the dark. The point of departure for the current research is human observation and the subjective act of counting – in all its inherent imperfection and error – as forming the empirical basis for all so-called “objective” knowledge and data collection.