the project

Sigi Torinus (Canada) Andrea Sunder-Plassmann (Germany); first launched in Australia with Anita Kocsis; sound by M. Wlodarkiewicz, O. Jarchov, A. Witte, I. Dubrovsky. Sound for the Canada shows by the Noiseborder Ensemble, Windsor Canada (including an LP).

browsing beauty is an ongoing multi-media installation project investigating the ephemeral and random nature of beauty as well as its culturally – bound notions. It consists of slide/video projections, audio, and weather balloons, and has been shown in Australia, the US, Germany, Russia, and Canada.

More specifically, browsing beauty looks at the complex interlinking and overlapping issues of body, beauty and mystery within the mutating contexts of culture and nature. The work focuses on interior experience and vulnerability of the body, while at the same time reflecting upon the possible distance created by our use of technological media. As browsing beauty is nomadic in its nature and calls for light travel, it is usually shown as a multilayered projection on giant weather balloons accompanied by a sound piece. Within the main discourse of beauty, the artists develop a specific sub theme for each new venue and cultural context. They understand themselves as catalysts that analyze each new situation from a fresh and intuitive perspective, capitalizing on the dialogues and unsuspected relationships that emerge when formal and unfamiliar conceptions of beauty are juxtaposed in time and space.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

background:

Reading Leonard Koren's book "Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers"–which is inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi associated with the tea ceremony–we became very much aware of how much beauty as an event remains a major engine in our lives. The book was both encouraging and validating: the idea that certain forms of aesthetics are becoming somewhat of an endangered species made us want to support the diversity of the cultural ecology, and we decided that the best approach would be collaborative, multilayered, interactive and capable of engaging a network of people.

Our initial title was broken beauty, reflecting the current state of discourse; also, with Andrea being German and Sigi part German with a German art school background, we were looking not only at the writings of Kant, Goethe and Schiller, but also for ways of addressing the heritage of a politically defined ideal of beauty formed during National Socialism, and how we could subvert the paradigm that of course could be found in other countries as well and that still shows up in ads, etc. We soon changed the title to browsing beauty, for we likened our studio process to the process of browsing: feeding and grazing on tender vegetation, sampling, in the hope of finding something of interest...

The project was first launched in 1997 with Anita Kocsis (Australia) at the SCA Gallery in Sydney, Australia. The show extended into an interactive web component, including a MOO we set up at the virtual PALACE on the internet that allowed people we knew in San Francisco and Berlin to "show up" virtually and communicate their ideas during the opening in Sydney. Further, before and during the show we collected people's thoughts/manifestos on beauty and projected them as slides.

The same year we brought browsing beauty to San Francisco, where it was shown at Gallery 16 with new video and a performance. In 1998 we created a very different-looking show in Berlin, Germany (Galerie im Marstall), with the balloons remaining as the main carriers of images, and in Moscow (Art Media Centre, TV Gallery Moscow), with Russian text and images we found in and around Moscow. In 1999 the idea of browsing beauty became the basis for "Slushaj! Sasha und der Kosmos"; in English “Listen – Sasha and the Cosmos” (Galerie im Marstall).

Since then, a whole lot has changed, not just in terms of what can be done technically, but also in terms of conceptual shifts: a proliferation of writing on beauty has sprung out of the silence. For instance, in her book On Beauty and Being (1999), Elaine Scarry argues that we can connect beauty with truth and justice. We can again say that beauty animates life and makes it worth living.

So far, each show had a different focus in relationship to beauty; Australia was intimacy (inspired by the vast distances geographically), Moscow had nostalgia (this was during the transition of Soviet Union to Russia), San Francisco was magic and pleasure (during the dotcom rise with its opulence), Berlin tackled the question of identity of a new Berlin after the wall came down. For Canada, we thought of the idea of longing - it's a country of immigrants, many dreaming of going 'home' one day, while in Australia immigrants came to stay for good...