Artist: Timo Seber
Exhibition title: Twitch
Venue: GAK – Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Date: April 25 – June 28, 2015
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and GAK – Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst Bremen
The work of Timo Seber links cultural and social phenomena with personal experience to create stories about the manner in which we perceive the world.
Developed especially for the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, his exhibition TWITCH takes its cue from contemporary video game culture and the live streaming of gaming tournaments, which now attract millions of spectators. While the community identified in the exhibition’s title – one of gaming culture’s most popular online platforms – is more widely known to younger audiences, it references a phenomenon that is set to spill over into mass media culture. It acts on a global, digital level with predominantly young adults and teens where the parameters that commonly define the conventions of our interpersonal communication and notions of success – sex, ethnic/social background and appearance – seemingly have little currency. TWITCH stands for the utopia of a society that is willing to break with the familiar conventions of social intercourse in order to seek out new forms.
Taking its inspiration from this cultural phenomenon, TWITCH will present “a makeshift training room of sorts” (Timo Seber), the antechamber to a world in which success is no longer a matter of physical advantage, sex or ethnic/social background. Within we find climbing ropes reminiscent of a high school gym hall dispersed about the room in a sculptural presentation with screenshots from video games tethered to their leather-tipped ends. They are combined with Leather t-shirts sporting digital prints. Akin to a type of armour in appearance, these items of apparel might also be mere merchandise and serve as reminders of the ubiquity of commercialization. Like bodies, a series of eye-catching futuristic air-beds stand upright against the wall, pinned in place by large plates of glass whose surfaces are adorned with images of computer mice. Adopting an approach that is at once cool and intriguing, Seber translates the visual idiom of the Internet into a material vocabulary that references such collective experiences as school sports programs and camping trips with air-beds.
Timo Seber (*1984) was born in Cologne and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne under Marcel Odenbach and Johannes Wohnseifer. He has previously exhibited at the Bonner Kunstverein, the Tobias Naehring Gallery or with Schmidt & Handrup. He lives in Berlin.
The TWITCH exhibition is staged in cooperation with the ADKV (Assembly of German Art Associations) and presents work created by Timo Seber as the recipient of the 2014 Columbus Contemporary Arts Fellowship. The Columbus Contemporary Arts Fellowship supports and promotes the work of emerging artists as they transition from the academy into the professional arena. Established by the Columbus Holding Group, the fellowship includes a monthly stipend paid to the artist over a six-month period and the development and production of an exhibition at a German art association together with an exhibition catalogue.
Interia X Lite (double), 2015
Purge, 2015,
Baumi, 2015
Interia X Wave Revon, 2015
Insulated Static V, 2015
Static V, 2015
Interia X Wave, 2015
Interia O Zone, 2015