it keeps running through her mind and she keeps softly humming to herself ffff, click, tick, plop, ptui

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 analogue exhibition formats that focus on the in-betweens of these spaces. It’s precisely this ‘interim’, which refuses binaries, that ‘Away from Keyboard’ is seeking to address.

The sculptural installations – including video, text, sound and performance – of Julia Carolin Kothe negotiate the (im-) possibilities of communication between (digital) objects, spaces and bodies. Her practice evolves in non-linear acts or chapters based on narratives combining fiction and theory that respond to particular conditions of exhibition spaces and the bodies within it. At Rosa Stern Space, she presented the newly commissioned piece It keeps running through her mind and she keeps softly humming to herself ffff, click, tick, plop, ptui (2021). Here, a short video sequence extracted from a recording by Kothe’s father depicts the artist at the age of four. A piece of wood that has been adapted to the size of hand luggage on flights, thus, hints at the pandemic conditions of art production and transport. Combined with miniature ceramics sculptures in the shape of broken and deformed iPhones, Kothe’s installation questions how the human relation to corporeality has been altered in the disembodied spaces of data, algorithms and technology of the 21st century.