FACING HUMANOIDS Stigter Van Doesburg gallery Amsterdam
FACING HUMANOIDS
In 2018 I created the exhibition ANIMA MUNDI for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, an exhibition about animation. The reason for this was the observation that we live in a time in which, due to increasing robotization, digitalization and Artificial Intelligence, we humans have started to have a different view of matter. Robots are increasingly taking the place of people, computers can now think for themselves, so it is not surprising that it will not be long before other human qualities are also attributed to something that is actually dead matter.
But this, as I tried to demonstrate in ANIMA MUNDI, is nothing new. Both the ancient Greeks and Renaissance people already had emotional relationships with images related to the human body. This went further than a purely artistic experience. Tribal peoples have a spiritual relationship with images or objects related to the human figure. These images/objects are not images of ancestors or gods but representatives of them. In other words, they attribute a soul to matter.
I find these similarities interesting and they play an important role in my new work. Hence the title for this exhibition; -FACING HUMANOIDS-
The literal translation of HUMANOIDS is ‘human-like'. To me this applies both to the increasingly human robots and to the tribal idea that matter could be animated. In addition, due to the developments mentioned, we ourselves are becoming more and more 'humanoids'. Increasing robotization also has an unnoticed influence on how we will interact with each other and our environment in the future.
text: Hans van der Ham