Depicting landscapes has been at the core of art making for hundreds of years, across cultures. Surveying the past centuries, one can monitor the way the representation of realistic landscapes or the staging of imagined ones reveals the preoccupation and cultural specificity of each period in time.

We live today in a realm that has been immensely complexified by the increased movement of humans and merchandise, and the continuous fluxes of data we receive and emit. While it was once only possible to live in one time-space at a time (here and now), networked and mobile computing has somehow given each individual a certain ability of ubiquity. Moreover, those same tools provide a constant layer of information that affects our perception of the environment in real time.

Surveying the way contemporary artists approach the complexity of the world, Datascape takes its name from the very notion of a reality that is ever more complexified by data. A conflation of the words Data and Landscape, it posits the notion that at this point in time, artists have integrated the various sources that may inform multi-layered systems of representation, ranging from the more classical to the more technological. Most works also explore the blur between that which is physical and that which is not, by transposing and juxtaposing elements in and out of the screen, thus reflecting upon the state of perceptual confusion and change this new space/time continuum has generated.

Curator: Benjamin Weil
Artists: Burak Arikan, Angela Bulloch, Nerea Calvillo, David Claerbout, Harun Farocki, Joan Fontcuberta, Michael Najjar, Enrique Radigales, Thomas Ruff, Karin Sander, Charles Sandison, Pablo Valbuena

Coproduction: LABoral Centro de Arte and Borusan Contemporary
Supported by Goethe Institute

LABoral is a multidisciplinary institution which produces, disseminates and fosters access to new forms of culture rooted in the creative use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Its transversal, integrated programming is targeted at a wide public base with the ultimate goal of generating and sharing knowledge.