Opening, April 8, 2025, 6 pm
Exhibition, April 9 – May 23, 2025
Olena Newkryta engages with the socio-political, historical, and material aspects of spaces, images, and technological infrastructures. In her works, she focuses on the complexity of the social fabric and collaborative forms of knowledge production. In particular, she is interested in the asymmetrical distribution of work, knowledge, and power against the backdrop of the techno-social permeation of our world and its physical, emotional, and psychological impacts on the lives of all.
Her audiovisual installation at Kunstraum Lakeside comprises new works exploring images that, according to the artist, “serve as infrastructures in the production of scientific knowledge as well as algorithmic realities.” Specifically, Newkryta investigates image populations used in the automated observation of our planetary system and their interpretation as part of machine learning processes. “By looking up to the sky and down on the earth, by travelling back to the past and glimpsing into the future, I am trying to grasp the ways in which those images have been and are framing and acting upon the world. How are they determining what can be seen and subsequently what can be known? What is their relation to contemporary forms of exploitation as well as (colonial) histories of extraction? And do they harbor a potential to disrupt rigid knowledge systems and technological applications?”
With the last question, Olena Newkryta points to the latent potential of the glitch in all processes of image and knowledge production. For her, “the glitch is the mineral that starts talking, the solid that becomes porous, the unknown that leaks into the dataset, the cloud that contaminates the view.”
Olena Newkryta (b. 1990 in Ukraine) lives and works in Vienna.
www.olenanewkryta.com
