June 06, 2024, 10 am – 2 pm

Many thanks to Nadia Kaabi-Linke for their lecture Indexicality as Anchor of Reality: Artistic Practices Beyond Symbolism and Iconicity and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.

“Since my studies and the beginning of my career in the “pre-post-factual times”—that was fifteen years ago—I have been interested in anchoring artistic creation in reality. While postmodern discourses stating that there was no ordinary reality we all share were dominant in arts and media theory, I repeatedly stepped on chunks of hidden and marginalised facts during my research. I asked myself, why hide such facts if there was no truth? Why invest in such political efforts?

I developed an artist practice that applies transpositions and indexes to web artistically ignited experiences into the mesh of real-world data surrounding us. Looking back on my practice, I want to re-position this approach in contrast to the use of symbolism and iconicity in art.” (Text by courtesy of Nadia Kaabi-Linke)

Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a multimedia conceptual artist based in Berlin and Kyiv. After graduating with an MA from the Tunis School of Fine Arts, she received a Ph.D. from the Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris. Growing up between Tunis, Kyiv, and Dubai, her personal history developed through the migration across cultures and borders that greatly influenced her artistic practice. Her work gives physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible in contemporary societies, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them. In a visually powerful way, she straddles beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, as well as the sublime and the vulgar, engaging the viewer in the play of conflicting forces of fear and attraction, repulsion and desire.

Her artworks were shown and are part of worldwide renowned collections, among which are the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sharjah Art Foundation in UAE, the Dallas Museum in Texas, FRAC Pays de Loire, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France. She had institutional solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie für Gegenwart, Berlin, National Art Museum Ukraine, Kyiv, Darat Al Funun in Amman, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Dallas Contemporary, Mosaic Rooms in London, and Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. Her works featured in international group shows and biennials such as the Lyon Biennale, Bruges Triennial, Liverpool Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, the Martha Hereford Museum, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, KW Institute and House of World Culture (HKW) in Berlin. She got awarded the Ithra Art Prize, the Francois Schneider Art Prize, the Art Basel Discovery Prize, and the Abraaj Group Art Prize, among others.

More information on the Nadia Kaabi-Linke Website.