↳ Exhibitions

Thomas Baldischwyler at Galerie Conradi

May 19, 2021

Artist: Thomas Baldischwyler

Exhibition title: IN CC (In virtual co-reality)

Venue: Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, Germany

Date: February – June, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Conradi, Hamburg

Dear Thomas

Something strange is happening in the social Yolobiont. Over-established avenues of familiar behavior are to be avoided. The new neurogenetic detour, by contrast, is brightly illuminated and more comfortable than any earlier detour ever was. Germany’s copper wires glow underground, fired up by all the new diversions, requests, and orders. The old alacrity manifests itself in all its realism, withered and clattering over cobblestones as though on an excursion out into the periphery gone awry. Meanwhile, accelerationism, that forever novel picking up of speed, bears the full blossom of a too-warm spring following a very harsh winter, with Fitbits, thermos bags for the takeout food, and well-rehearsed clapbacks.

A brain overwhelmed by sensory impressions reacts by flooding diversions the way high water is diverted into dry riverbeds. Cognitive capitalism grades dry riverbeds and then floods them in order to harvest all the gunk that the waves wash up. Where new digital lines are laid, new processing formats spring up as well. I’ll try from now on to avoid natural metaphors.

So which new things are we learning that we’d long forgotten?

In the looped fragment from the video “Russian Rave in Forest,” a gathering of partiers dissolves into separate LED pixels. The colorful crowd radiates a gentle warmth that carries me one step backward. From my new vantage point, I recognize the entire video—it’s familiar—but at twice or three times the speed. I can no longer focus on the briskly moving energetic bodies with their highly alert faces. I notice for the first time how calm and analytical the tracking shot is. Its emphasis is on content and context. After I’m briefly blinded, I see the guy with the bottles in isolation, thrashing into a white background. He looks lost and lonely to my eye in this 0 space, disconnected from himself and his friends.

Is he alright? At least he’s got water, is he alone, where’s he going?

And then it happens—he steps out of his collage, of your field of view, and back into his reality, the dancing continues, which is where, to me, the loop starts afresh. He’s free once more and in his nature.

What am I learning anew here that I’d long forgotten?

The individual extracted from the magical feeling of a collective seems creepy and lost. The feeling is eminently capitalizable, and it’s also exactly this moment that the abovementioned re-territorializing accelerationism leverages. I walk to the left, out of the noisy and dancing forest, and on the plateau encounter “First acid and now this! Vogueing” Daniel Craig as James Bond in a mirror—it’s a German winter. 1989?—History is being made. It’s about right-wing hatred and watches. This must have been little over a year ago. Creepy subjects, about lost individuals who would be a mark of “their” time.

“Neurogenetic detour” denotes the expansion of one’s own system of references around an obstacle. I’ve looked at two of your pictures, the first two, the excursion goes on for another nine hours, things are looking bright and comfortable IN CC.

Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur.

Yours,
Goscha
6.3.21

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (R.R.I.F.), 2021, video still (loop), LED panel, wooden frame, speaker, 102,5 x 102,5 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, IN CC (In virtual co-reality), Exhibition view, Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, 2021

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Deutscher Winter), 2021, collage, print on paper, 27,5 x 42,5 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, IN CC (In virtual co-reality)

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Prime Air 1,2), 2020, collage on cardboard, acrylic glass frame, 73 x 53 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Prime Air 1), 2020, collage on cardboard, acrylic glass frame, 73 x 53 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, IN CC (In virtual co-reality)

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (You look better in real life), 2020, collage on paper, 41,5 x 29,5 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Der gerissene Faden), 2019, collage on paper, 41,5 x 29,5 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, IN CC (In virtual co-reality)

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Vitamin C), 2020, collage, acrylic, enamel and caulking on canvas, LED lights, metal frame, 142,5 x 102,5 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, IN CC (In virtual co-reality)

Thomas Baldischwyler, O.T. (Katholische Ausbildung), 2021, collage, LP cover, poster, 83,5 x 59 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, RGBRGB 6 blau (2), 2020, mixed materials on canvas, acrylic frame, double-sided, 144 x 104 cm

Thomas Baldischwyler, RGBRGB 4 rot (4), 2020, mixed materials on alu-dibond, acrylic frame, double-sided, 144 x 104 cm, RGBRGB 5 grün (3), RGBRGB 6 blau (2)