Adorably Horror Series – Joas Nebe
INTRO:
MONSTER #1
(4k/HD single channel video, color, 1m23s excerpt)
Monsters are haunting us. (The more the better, the more the more contemporary).
Monsters have faces like us.
Monsters are behaving like humans.
Monsters are everywhere, monsters are us without soul.
Monsters make us move and continue.
Monsters are progress.
Monsters are economical progress.
Because monsters are haunting us into the future.
Without monsters we are nothing.
Without monsters and demons we should stop trying anything.
ARTIST ́s STATEMENT:
Gaming into Mindfulness
Interview with Joas Nebe by Rebecca Schoensee (excerpt)
“It’s a never-ending game of disintegration. I challenge the viewer by not living up to his or her expectations. I am denying the satisfaction of solving the riddle, hidden within the depth of my artwork.” By turning his filmic cabinet of curiosity into an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of hybrid geometric patterns, Joas Nebe teases the viewer into accessing his game. He believes: “Riddle games of this kind spark creativity and pass on the role of the artist to the viewer.”
Taking the Reason Prisoner
To Nebe, “fantasy and creative intelligence are important survival skills today.” So is chess, an analogy he keeps referring to: “Chess exemplifies my game with the viewer. In a world of shortening attention spans, it’s an ideal concentration-practice. One always has to think a few steps in advance.” By screening the insanity of our daily chase towards evolutionary bankruptcy, Nebe in a clever move takes the reason prisoner, only to appoint reason to be the king of his game of chess. He calls for a close review of the encyclopedia of our philosophical and cultural foundations. In his opinion reason has the potential to direct a path away from the horror vacui he is depicting: “The model of enlightenment has increasingly been discredited, wrongfully I believe. Today survival and coexistence are only possible if governed by the faculty of reason. Labeling and connoting intellectual categories help to bring new relations into sight and to gain unexpected terms of knowledge.”
The interview essay “Gaming Into Mindfulness” has been published in Humanize Magazine, issue 11, p. 20-31.
Artist:
Joas Nebe, who holds degrees in psychology and literature, is a self taught artist, born in Hamburg but now located in South Germany. After a few years in Berlin he decided three years ago to move south close to the French and Swiss border. Important exhibits include the artist´s “Climate Change Cartoons“ on display on exhibition “Letters from the Sky” which accompanied the Durban UN conference on Climate Change 2011 in South Africa and “Machine Fair”- a film about the mechanical site of a metropolis- shown at Museum of Modern Art, Moscow as part of “Now&After” screening in 2012. Other film works
has been shown at 25th Festival Les Instants Video (Biblioteca Alexandrina, Cairo), Videoformes Festival 2014 and 2015, Sustain Our Africa, Madatac 3, 4, 5, 6 Competitive Official International Selection (Madrid), Papy Gyros Nights 2016 Hong Kong/ ART_TECTURE, In 24hours: Future Visions (SHIFT:ibpcpa) 2020, just to name a few.
Solo shows are “Intrude Art and Life” at the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai in 2008, where Santiago Capriccio, a short epilogue to the Philosophical Cartoon cycle was chosen to be one out of 100 non Chinese artists to be displayed on public video screens in Shanghai for one day, 2016 “Encyclopedic”, a one night solo show at The Greenhouse, Berlin, 2016, “You Did A Bad Thing For A Good Reason”, solo show at Berlin´s Cormac Weiss Gallery, curated by Marinus Jo Dimitrov IFEA (International Curatorial Award 2016) supported by Christopher Grape Fund; 2017 “On Nature” at 16:9 Gallery, UTCL, USA curated by Manzi Yang, 2020 The Palace Project, Online Fine Arts Museum, Argentine.
2017 Joas Nebe received a M 5 ARTS stipend for his video work “The Dictionary serial” (USA). 2017 he has been awarded with the Residency by Correspondence from The Arts Territory Exchange Program, 2018 with the Social Media Residency by Peripheral Forms, the Online Residency by Coldbench (all UK), the Social Media Residency by Open Call Artists by @boykeats/ Lu Gallagher (2020) and ECUMENE Residence (2020).
Joas Nebe ́s curatorial works have been shown in different European countries. He developed three projects to which international video artists contributed. “The Encyclopedic Cartoons Video Project” had it ́s premiere in Berlin and has been shown since in many European countries. His second curatorial work “the Proverb Picture Project” again with participating artist from different continents and countries had it´ s premiere on VisualContainer TV in 2014. 2017 Joas Nebe developed a project about democracy, scrabble and wordlists, called “The Democracy Scrabble Project”, had it´s premiere again on VisualContainer TV and (.BOX) Video Project Room, Milan in 2018.
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