In 2024, Kultur | lx continues its series of ‘cartes blanches’. After a year in which illustration dominated our homepage with works by Dirk Kesseler, Irina Moons and Keong-A Song, followed by a year dedicated to video with works by Suzan Noesen and Justine Blau, Kultur | lx is initiating a cycle around the digital arts, starting with the work Artificial God by the Luxembourg-based XR artist and director Laura Mannelli.

“Artifical God is a digital work created using Al. Inspired by the Rorschach test, the AI transposes a series of illustrations into a video sequence. The work contrasts a cult film from the 1920s, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and in particular his humanoid robot Futura, with an equally cult text from the 1980s, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. While Fritz Lang’s film featured a robot for the first time in cinema, it was the image of the evil female witch that was chosen to embody a robot capable of causing chaos among humans. Based on the closing postulate of the Cyborg manifesto, I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess, I wanted to free Maria from her condition as a woman caught between the figure of a saintly woman venerated in her human version and that of an evil woman and witch in her robot counterpart. So while Fritz Lang’s film suggests that machines are capable of controlling, manipulating and enslaving men, Maria, through Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure, is on the contrary capable of freeing herself from her control systems in order to emancipate herself from rigid categories, whether in terms of gender, nature or social status. The video shows Maria’s hypnotic transmutation into a super-powerful ‘Mecha’. ‘Mechas’ are huge robotic containers packed with technology that enable their human hosts to acquire superhuman abilities. It’s a way of denouncing man’s relentless quest to transcend his human condition and become a kind of artificial god.“, explains the artist.

Discover her work on the home page of our website.

For its new carte blanche, Kultur | lx commissioned visual artist Justine Blau to reinterpret the values and visual identity of Kultur | lx through a work of art in the form of a video.

“In the animated film ‘Animate’, we get a glimpse of a soap bubble in a laboratory setting, which takes on a variety of uncontrollable cellular forms. For me, the soap bubble signifies breath and ephemerality, the tension between life and death. Its perfect shape refers to the infinitely small and the infinitely large, from the atom to the stars. I like the fact that the title refers to the medium itself, to the magic of the cinematic world, which we associate with movement, change and the illusion of life. This video is a reflection on the act of creation, which lies between mastery and the untamable. We create in part to capture reality, and yet it remains somehow elusive, while each gesture contributes to its transformation. In this way, culture, in its broadest sense, is slowly created before our eyes. Artists are in this act of constant research, and Kultur | lx, through its support, participates in this process“, comments the artist.

Discover the work on the home page of our website and on our social networks. (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram)

Kultur | lx continues its “carte blanche” series in 2023, giving artists the opportunity to reinterpret the values and visual identity of Kultur | lx. After a year in which illustration dominated our homepage with works by Dirk Kesseler, Irina Moons and Keong-A Song, Kultur | lx is initiating a series around video, starting with an artwork by the Luxembourg artist and director Suzan Noesen.

“I wanted to make a video with a gestural metaphor for the activities surrounding culture and art – whether it is making, mediating, preserving, consuming, it is all about trying to grasp an essence which is contained in a form but which is never truly tangible. So the existence, value and pleasure of art and culture – aesthetics – might consist mostly in sustaining the practices, the attempts, the imperfect fumbling for something that lies behind the senses. In maintaining the practice of art and culture through different times, realities, technologies.The title is an excerpt from the dialogue of my recent work OBSOLETE TERRAIN, about an apple tree with its large symbolics of conscience, genesis – the beginning of sedentary culture – or the self-destruction of the tree through its bred hyper-productivity.“, comments the artist.

Discover the artwork on the home page of our website and our social media pages. (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram)