The confrontation with technology is the central feature of art today: as ground, subject, signal and noise. Art’s utopian, emancipatory, critical, political and cult potential no longer provides the questions that vex our days and nights. Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, mother of the Muses, sends a message that always arrives. Artists are necessarily contemporary; they live nowhere else than in their time.

“The contemporary artist is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own moment so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure.” (Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?, 2008). The contemporary artist both is and strives to be of his time; neither present nor absent, he works in the gap in between.

What is the work? (Thought, practice)

And the darkness? (Look)

And the gap? (A place of meetings; a place of unforeseen encounters; a non-place)

Robert Simon was born in NYC, and is currently resident in Amsterdam. He studied Studio Art at the State University of NY at Binghamton, Hunter College (NYC), and Art History/Philosophy at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore PA), and Harvard University (Cambridge MA). He has published and exhibited in the US and in Europe.

Robert Simon and Anna Bolten will exhibit together: individual works as well as works and ideas in collaboration.