Contemporary Art and Culture
In March 2020, Nicola Ginzel arrived at the Q21 Art Residency at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. This residency, which hosts international artists and selects one American artist every two months with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, is designed to foster creative exchange through collaboration, networking, and studio visits.
How can artists unmute themselves and make work in creative dialogue with each other while they experience forced solitude at faraway places? How can collaborative practices be reinvented in social isolation? And how can virtual and chance encounters between strangers can lead to the making of jointly authored images and objects? The un/mute project, initiated by EUNIC New York and Undercurrent, the independent exhibition space in DUMBO, was an attempt to probe these questions by inviting 32 artists to work across borders, languages, and media, while sharing the global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic at distant locations, under varied social circumstances, and in cultural contexts.