Paul Almasy Louvre, Paris, 1942 (c) the artist and akg-images / Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs
AMissingRoom
Lundhal & Seitl (Stockholm)
16 December 2022
14:00 MST / 16:00 EST / 21:00 GMT
Online Performance
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, digitalization and surveillance accelerated, laws were reconstituted and living habits altered around the world.
“AmissingRoom” (2020) is an app that transforms our smartphones into makeshift VR goggles through a physical process between two people. It is a score of moving, sensing and being affected by the absences created by the pandemic, such as the closing of museums and theatres, but it is also the tangible presence of exploring the affordances of reciprocity and the conditions for being together in times of physical distancing.
Passing through walls into tunnels that travel through a network of past exhibitions and museums, people interact with each other but somewhat fail to coincide and share each other’s realities. By enacting the artwork’s score, the two people are led to consider how they balance resilience and resistance when adapting to a changing environment.
Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm. Their immersive solo projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes via choreography, matter and time. Presented around the world, notable at Royal Academy of Art in 2014, Gropius-Bau, in 2016, and Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2017. Group Exhibition includes the 8th Momentum Biennale of Nordic Contemporary Art, 2015 (NO) ‘An Imagined Museum’ Centre Pompidou Metz, 2016-2017 (FR) the 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016-2017 (IN) a recent commission: Echoes of Alternative Histories at Staatsteater Kassel, coincide with Documenta Fifteen. In the fall of 2022, the duo was visiting artists at the ACT Programme at MIT.
The duo Lundahl & Seitl has developed a method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world. Notions of freedom, autonomy, and what is real, imagined, and perceived are negotiated in an investigation of virtual reality, not as a form of technology but as an ability or sensibility to a relationship with surroundings with an increased insight how technology makes ‘us’ and lay the ground for ‘our’ human umwelt – how it connects and disconnects us from each other and other lifeforms and processes.