Three artists’ digital work has been chosen for exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York City, after a public vote from a shortlist of 10 creators. MoMI and the Tezos Foundation today announced that the three selected finalists under the Community Curation project are Rodell Warner, Anna Malina and Ceren Su Çelik. The shortlist was nominated by leading blockchain advocates in the Tezos art community in conjunction with Regina Harsanyi, MoMI Associate Curator of Media Arts, and Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, Head of Arts at Trilitech.
The shortlist was published on 12 September, with the public asked to vote in the past 10 days to select a group of finalists to have their work shown on the Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall at MoMI, in Astoria, New York City.
Sea change: Rodell Warner, still from the gif Waiting Backstage (Heirloom collection) (2024)
The Trinidadian artist Rodell Warner works in new media and photography, with a focus on digital animations related to early photography in the Caribbean. His recent exhibitions include showing work in Fragments of Epic Memory (2022) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and this year showing hand-drawn digital 3D renderings of plants in Sea Change at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM),
Anna Malina, No Rest for the Wicked (2024)
The German experimental artist Anna Malina explores moving image history in her work with self-portraiture and appropriated images, creating music videos, animations, short films, and music videos.
Ceren Su Çelik, It will Follow You, 2024
The Istanbul-based Cern Su Çelik works at the border of cybernetics and art, across the disciplines of painting, computer-based visualisation, sound, video, and artificial intelligence (AI). Çelik has shown this year at Art on Tezos: In Motion at NFC Summit, in Lisbon; at Noise Media Art Fair in Istanbul, Turkey and at New:Now in Ankara.
“The Community Curation project highlights the strength of blockchain-related art communities by expanding beyond the conventional role of a singular curatorial vision,” Harsanyi and Artamonovskaja say. “By inviting widespread public participation in the final voting process, we aim to illustrate decentralised curatorial power in practice and engage a broader audience in shaping art exhibition alternatives.”
The Community Curation initiative is part of a year-long collaboration between MoMI and the grant-making Tezos Foundation, Museum without walls, launched in June, to encourage artists working with emerging technologies, and to involve the museum’s audience in the act of collecting (for free) using an interactive station in the museum’s lobby to acquire and take home fragments from complimentary open editions of newly created digital art. The first open edition on offer was from the celebrated Net artist Auriea Harvey, an early adopter of the Tezos blockchain.