The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York City has named the three winners Community curation competition, which will award digital artists whose works are largely based on movement an exhibition on the lobby walls.
In the coming weeks, Ceren Su Çelik, Anna Malina, and Rodell Warner will meet with MoMI staff curators to select works to be displayed on the Schlosser Media Wall at the Queens institution. The museum is located in the former Paramount studio complex (originally known as Famous Players-Lasky), built in the 1920s, opened in 1988, and underwent a $67 million renovation in 2008.
The community-selected artworks will be displayed alongside some of the 130,000 artifacts related to film, television and time-based media in the museum’s permanent collection.
“With a still image you can somehow see it all at once,” said Warner, a Trinidadian-born visual artist. Hyperallergic. “With moving images you cannot see the entire image at once. It takes time to reconstruct the image in your head or put the pieces together.”
Earlier this month, MoMI published a shortlist of 10 artists based on nominations by what the museum called “blockchain advocates” and held a voting session via Typeform survey from September 11 to 22. The project is sponsored by the decentralized digital art blockchain foundation Tezos, according to a MoMI spokesperson.
Çelik, a Turkish artist, introduces “cyborgs and hybridized elements” to “explore the co-evolution of humanity and technology in the modern world,” according to a statement from the artist. Her 2024 work ‘It Will Follow You’ combines artificial reflections, blurred paint strokes, fruit, garbage bags and terrifying two-legged creatures.
“Her work explores how technology reshapes identities and bodies in a dynamic digital landscape,” wrote Grida, Çelik’s nominator.
Selected artist Molina’s 2023 work ‘Kollaps’ goes through several phases of a distorted face as it crumbles like a piece of paper.
“Through her chosen subjects… she injects subjectivity and poetry into a medium and aesthetic domain that can sometimes seem callous or inhuman,” said Molina’s nominator, who goes by the name Vincent Van Dough.
Warner said Hyperallergic that he has been documenting plants in the United States for the past five years, often in what he calls “simulated glass vessels.”
“That way I can kind of preserve them,” Warner said, “and look at them and share them with others.”
Warner also sees his digital art practice as a way to stay connected to Trinidad. He alters archival images of the Caribbean – which he says depicts the Caribbean “almost as machines, less as people” – to disrupt early photographic narratives of his homeland.
The exhibition opens on November 22 at MoMI, with visitors also having the opportunity to ‘mint’ a fragment of the digital art as a souvenir or record it on the blockchain.
