with Un-Zu Ha-Nul Lee, Julia Carolin Kothe and Mira Mann
As a magazine that operates primarily in virtual space but took its start in exhibition making, PASSE-AVANT invited three emerging artists – Un-Zu Ha-Nul Lee, Julia Carolin Kothe and Mira Mann – for an exhibition that stresses the correlation of digital and physical space. Taking inspiration from Legacy Russel’s seminal publication Glitch Feminism (2020), the show ‘Away from Keyboard’ negotiates the digital realm as a space in which the online informs the offline and vice versa. The title of the show goes back to sociologist Nathan Jurgenson’s proposal to replace the commonly used abbreviation IRL (‘In Real Life’) with AFK (‘Away from Keyboard’), emphasizing the interconnected multiplicity of physical and numeric embodiments.
Marking PASSE-AVANT’s 5th anniversary, the show is conceived as a fluid container that is carried by the ideas, thoughts and conflicts of a young generation of cultural workers who have informed both virtual and physical worlds adjacent to the magazine over the past years. These considerations form the backbone of ‘Away from Keyboard’, which scrutinizes the digital as a site in which identities are in flux and can be (re-)born, edited and buried simultaneously.
The exhibition developed over the course of one year during online conversations between the artists and curators. As a physical vessel for these virtual encounters, the artists’ works could not have found a better place “away from keyboard” than at Rosa Stern Space in Munich. Considering themselves as an autonomous platform and interactive network, Rosa Stern Space encourages examinations of digital and analog exhibition formats that focus on the in-betweens of these spaces. It’s precisely this ‘interm’, which refuses binaries, that ‘Away from Keyboard’ is seeking to address.