Echos und Zukunftsgeflüster in verwunschenen Zeiten

(Echoes and whispers of the future in enchanted times)

Room installation with video, sound and sculpture

2023

I take the term building literally and understand places as living beings that house life, take on different forms of use and (have to) submit to human decisions. Especially below the surface of the visible, everything is in a perpetual process of change from one state of being to another.

The elements of this installation emerge from such a process: the artist’s own watercolors of organic structures are both used as a data set for a self-trained neural network and developed into videos, and deconstructed and processed into the physical mass for the creaturely sculptures. The sound subtly takes aspects of the site and its history and interweaves them with others. An encounter between the rigid and the living, the solid and the fluid, and the blurring of these boundaries.

The work speaks to the collective need to redefine our role as part of a whole. In doing so, it does not provide answers, but shows a search for aliveness and connection. An arrival in the unknown. A spatial installation in which the past, current events and imaginary future scenarios intermingle and recompose themselves away from human-centered narratives.

About Marie-Luise Meister

Website

Marie-Luise Meister is an interdisciplinary artist, originally from Berlin and currently living in Leipzig. She studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and has a professional background in theater, music and project management. She has been artist in residence in China, Slovakia, Georgia, Italy, and Palestine, and has been a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation fellow since 2017. In her current work, she combines digital processes such as self-trained neural networks (AI) with analog techniques such as painting and sculpture to create situations in which historical events and imagined future scenarios overlap and refract in space. Thematically, she explores symbiotic evolution, epigenetics, and storytelling, weaving the various strands together in an ongoing series of site-specific spatial installations that include video, sound, text, painting, and sculpture.