Fotograf Zone – Omar Kholeif – Art in the Age of Anxiety

Omar Kholeif’s name will ring a bell to those concerned with the repercussions of modern technology on art. Conceived to accompany an exhibition with the same, slightly generic title, featuring a number of usual suspects, following the by now classical formula of essayistic anthology teetering at the edge of art and academia by an almost all male cast of writers Art in the Age of Anxiety still strikes one as uncannily timely. Written after the actual exhibition closed shortly upon opening, the commissioned authors decided to write from and about the situations they were experiencing in a pandemic that once again powerfully demonstrated the might and potential of technologies but also the detrimental impact of information, misinformation, deception and secrecy in the digital age.

Text: Laura Amann

Laura Amann

is a curator and architect living and working in Vienna. Currently she is a curator at Kunsthalle Wien alongside the WHW collective. Amann is the co-founder of Significant Other, a project space and curatorial platform concerned with the overlaps of art and architecture. More recent projects look at madness and insanity as forms of knowledge, and sensuality and how they produce spaces for disobedience.

#39 Delight, Pain

e feel like revising our relationships. This time, relationships between people. Relationships between genders whose borders are not as firm as we might have thought until recently – instead, they are entirely permeable. Society responds to non-binary or transformative identities in various ways: with sexism, vehement exclusion, hidden exclusion, glass ceilings or attempts at inclusion. The proportion of these forces is constantly developing and changing and we decided to focus on them, and not alone. We opted for an experiment, and invited, as guest editors, the collective of the studio of New Aesthetics at the Department of Photography at FAMU, Prague: Nikol Czuczorová, Nikolaj Jessen, Andrej Kiripolský, Zuzana-Markéta Macková, Tobias Páral, Ezra Šimek, Leevi Toija, Max Vajt and Hynek Alt with Jen Kratochvil. This collaboration broadened our perspective to include the age group of those currently studying. Together, we arrived not only at the result of the printed issue but also at a new form of digital content – a series of podcasts and videos. Our guests helped sensitize and materialize the themes depicted on the mental map they created when conceiving the issue, lobbying for a revision of our established perception of the selected aggregate that forms the backbone of the magazine’s content: pleasure, pain, chaos, jouissance, anxiety, responsibility, orgasm, non-binary language, activism, perversion, social experiment. The chain of association can continue as you browse the pages of the magazine or listen to the podcasts, whose considerable ambition is to use the spoken word to discuss visual art. It will be delight accompanied by pain – otherwise it would not be delight at all.