Judith Hopf: !Hear Rings!

kaufmann repetto presents ! Hear Rings !, Judith Hopf’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. For her show at kaufmann repetto milano, the artist will present a new body of works including sculptures, prints and a four-minute video animation.

The exhibition explores the modalities through which information circulate in the digital era. The artist investigates the way we receive and address digital data, and how we position ourselves towards such a flow of information. Nowadays our accounts are always connected, even if we turn off our computers. E-mails arrive at any time, and so do news – the internet does not know any closing hour. We are always “in line on-line,” so to speak, while believing ourself to be off line.

When looked at from this point of view, Judith Hopf’s concrete cast Snakes seem to force a break in this ongoing “newsfeed”. In his Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze defines the snake, with its physical flexibility, as a symbol of the society of control in which we live. Deleuze compares the serpent to the man of control who is “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network“ – a person who is asked to be always ready for processes of constant physical and mental changes, in order to fit into society and its needs. Judith Hopf’s snake sculptures, however, become petrified in an ironic contrast: while showing their teeth and tongues, built out of printed emails and newspapers, the rest of their usually supple bodies look static and stuck somewhere in a system of endless variables provided by the net and its geometry.

With the video animation More (2015), also on view at the gallery, the artist seems to ask for a possibility of self-positioning while looking at the world through a bird eye view perspective – a point of view usually provided by navigation systems such as Google Maps. Inspired by the film Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames, Judith Hopf animates a zoom from outer space into a inner world, questioning if, through the use of modern technologies, we are actually enlarging or rather mining our understanding of distances and of other complex possible views of the world we live in.

The new graphic works presented by Judith Hopf on the walls of the gallery will show, with a dose of humor, other human “receivers”: two oversized ears seeking for different news, paired to spirals that are sending out hypnotizing disturbances. These big ears serve as an antidote to our state of FOMO, our constant fear-of-missing-out.