Automatic Receivers

Automatic Receivers, a special nocturnal (physical!) edition of Brandstof. Our curator, Pádraic E. Moore, will introduce various phenomena from the exhibition such as automatism and receiving (‘recipere’). We will also dive deeper into The Great Invocation together with artworks by Ruchama Noorda, Ewoud van Rijn, Dr. Tessel M. Bauduin and Linder Sterling. 

Dr. Tessel M. Bauduin kicks off the first part of the evening by giving a short lecture entitled ‘The Castle Problem: reflections on automatism and other dimensions in modern and contemporary art’, in which she will discuss how ‘automatism’ is still relevant within contemporary art. Artist Ewoud van Rijn will take over and will be presenting a brief introduction to his new publication that he has made in conjunction with this exhibition.

In the second part, Garage Rotterdam presents And the space like a root, a new moving image work by Linder Sterling that has been made for The Great Invocation. In this work, Linder takes vintage softcore pornography as a raw material, activating and obscuring it with a process called ‘mantic staining’. Thereafter, Ruchama Noorda presents Rx, a performative PowerPoint presentation. Derived from the Latin word ‘recipere’, the title refers to Rx as used in electronics and telecommunications for ‘the receiver’, but also refers to the medical term for a doctor’s prescription. The PowerPoint presentation is associated with corporate offices and academic institutions, the stuff of proposals and sales pitches. Here, Noorda hijacks the format and uses it for higher, spiritual purposes.