UNTER WELTEN | By Reinhard Buskies, 2022

The project Unter Welten brings together two artistic positions at the intersections physical and digital worlds. Spatial sculptures combine with video projections with video projections and computer-generated imagery and reflect on different world models and world views.

Exhibition at Grölle Pass Projects Raum2 from November 5th, 2022 – January 07th, 2022. The collaboration will start from September 15th, 2022 with a communicative preparation period.

Our idea of the world implies a variety of worlds. Already antiquity distinguishes between the living world of man and the underworld. With the discovery of America, the known world splits into a New World and an Old World. Today the global world community seems to us economically divided into a first, second and third world. In a broader sense, a distinction could be made between real and imaginary worlds. And in the context of an advancing digitalization of our everyday world, virtual worlds are increasingly coming into play alongside the familiar physical world.

In the project Unter Welten Christine Schulz and Evangelos Papadopoulos jointly develop a space-related installation and thereby refer to different world models. They operate at the interfaces of physical and digital worlds and approach the subject from different sides, as it were. While Papadopoulos, coming from sculpture, develops expansive structures and increasingly integrates digital (image) elements, Christine Schulz’s works are based on digital videos that appear in sculptural and installative spaces. „Analog“ materials such as wood, plasterboard, or metal profiles are used, as well as natural and artificial light and digitally generated elements and processes, including 3D computer animation and photogrammetry.

While the physical world is directly tangible in front of us, the digital world is always a technically mediated one whose primary manifestation is the screen image. The transition between the worlds is associated with a transformation from the material to the immaterial. Nevertheless, the boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred in our everyday reality. Augmented reality and social media are the most telling examples of this. And the recently introduced vision of a metaverse, a shift of all areas of life into a virtual world in which we act as avatars, seems to be the next step.

The idea of a multiplicity of worlds is connected with questions about hierarchies and categorizations, about relations between the self and the foreign, about the determination of the position of the self. In the installation by Christine Schulz and Evangelos Papadopoulos, world images and world views overlap, associative fields open up and form a complex network of relationships. The work does not aim at a final reading, but at the open process, at an orientation within and between the worlds that has to be searched for again and again.