Apr. 21, 2020
The current crisis has forced many galleries to move their public activities online. In addition to online exhibitions, galleries are now offering daily interviews with artists in quarantine, studio visits, talks and performances on their Instagram stories and IGTV channels. We have selected some of the top galleries to watch, as exciting online initiatives continue to roll out.
Through their series ‘IN TOUCH – A Visual Dialogue,’ each week Berlin-based gallery carlier | gebauer has invited a gallery artist to takeover their Instagram account and invite another artist for a virtual exchange. The live and interactive exchange is fluid and up to the artists. Entering their 5th week, Erik Schmidt will take over their Instagram and will engage in an exchange with Berlin-based artist and friend Gregor Hildebrandt.
Paris-based Galerie Chantal Crousel presents their online series ‘A Moment With,’ which invites their represented artists to show their work over the gallery’s Instagram. The artists have done exhibition walk-throughs and offered glimpses into their current studio practice, sometimes highlighting new works-in-progress. The previous live stories are archived on the gallery’s story highlights, with contributions by Anri Sala, Hassan Khan and Fabrice Gygi, among others.
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, based in New York and Rome, uses their Instagram Live to present special weekly performances by Swedish, Berlin-based artist Karl Holmqvist. In his artistic practice, Holmqvist often deals with words and language through text-based works, and his live performances and readings from quarantine are archived on the gallery’s IGTV.
Over the last few weeks Johann König has been presenting the ’10am Series’: live discussions with represented artists on König Galerie’s Instagram. You can watch all the archived chats in the story highlights of their Instagram page, including conversations with Jeremy Shaw, Katharina Grosse and Elmgreen & Dragset, to name a few. On April 9th, König Galerie opened the first exhibition taking place on their new virtual space, KÖNIG DIGITAL. The show, entitled ‘Surprisingly This Rather Works,’ presents work by Manuel Rossner and is curated by Anika Meier and Johann König. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of talks, which will be broadcasted live on Instagram. The speakers in the series are experts on internet art, post-internet art and digital art. The exhibition will be followed by further shows as part of ‘THE ARTIST IS ONLINE’ series.
Nicodim Gallery, based in Los Angeles and Bucharest, is presenting short video interviews with artists in quarantine on their IGTV channel. So far, Nicodim has presented interviews with artists John Duncan, Philipp Kremer, Dominique Fung, Simphiwe Ndzube, Katherina Olschnaur, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, or Zhou Yilun, among many others. You can see all of them archived on the gallery’s Instagram page.
Pace Gallery, based in New York, London, Hong Kong, Geneva, Palo Alto and Seoul introduced a new format of interviews, in which artists interview other artists on their Instagram. Recently, Nina Katchadourian and Lisa Liu talked about their collaboration and their newly released album, ‘the sTans’. In the second episode of Pace’s Instagram Live conversation series, artist Trevor Paglen spoke with leading academic and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, KateCrawford, about art, politics and AI in the time of COVID-19.
