browsing beauty is a research-creation project around the ephemeral and seemingly random nature of beauty. It can be site-sensitive, interactive. We develop images, sounds and spatial concepts according to each context: architectural, cultural, social, atmospheric and aesthetic. Each event is individualized with a sub-theme, using part of an extensive audio-visual database collected throughout the years for each show and in various contexts.
browsing beauty is nomadic in its nature and calls for light travel; we present it as an audiovisual environment with multilayered projections on architecture, giant spheres, or other sculptural surfaces.
Considering beauty’s culturally bound notions and shifting concepts, browsing beauty capitalizes on the dialogues and unsuspected relationships that emerge when formal and unfamiliar conceptions of beauty juxtapose in time and space. The work focuses on interior experience and vulnerability of the body while at the same time reflecting upon the possible distance created by our use of technological media.
Each project has a different focus on beauty. In Australia, we worked with the idea of intimacy, inspired by the vast distances geographically. In Moscow, it was nostalgia- this was during the transition of the Soviet Union to Russia. San Francisco was all about magic and pleasure – this was during the dot-com rise with its opulence. In Berlin, we looked at the identity of a new Berlin after the wall came down. For Canada, we focussed on the idea of longing and migration; it’s a country of immigrants, many dreaming of “back home.” For Norway, we picked hot/cold; for Cuba, it was floating/being in between..
browsing beauty is an ongoing multi-media installation project investigating the ephemeral and random nature of beauty as a means of transformative change.
Artists
Andrea Sunder-Plassmann lives in Berlin, Germany and works with photography, film/ video and installations. A pioneer of the early experimental and multidisciplinary art scene of Berlin in the 1980s, Andrea’s work combined performance with photography, Super8 and 16mm film. From there, she began creating both temporary and site-specific installations that explore the synergies between object and environment and the impact of the viewer as an element in the work. Using photography to examine time, light and space, Andrea’s work examined both perception and human nature. While her artistic focus has shifted from the autobiographical to the contemporary, Andrea continues to experiment with the boundaries of both cognition and intuition.
Sigi Torinus was born in the US Virgin Islands and received her MFA from the Braunschweig Art Institute, Germany, and San Francisco State University in California. Informed by her nomadic life, Sigi’s work explores our perceptions of the migratory journey, through time and space, in both physical and digital worlds. Her art returns time and again to the themes of origin, departure, navigation and destination. Playing with concepts like presence and absence, visibility and intangibility, her hybrid new media installations often combine sculptural elements with video, audio, and performance, creating an immersive environment that activates our different senses both viscerally and intellectually. Her works have been exhibited in the US, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia and Canada