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‘Living Painting: Nature’_ Refik Anadol Opening Kunsthal Rotterdam [Photo: Marco De Swart]

On November 17, the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum opened Refik Anadol solo exhibition ‘Living Painting: Nature’ during the Friday Night LIVE. In the heart of one of the most characteristic architectural areas of Rotterdam, the museum brings to the city a variety of contemporary artists as well as promoting numerous activities to engage with the local community. With the intent of connecting with the city life and its citizens, the peculiarity of the museum is to make any exhibition accessible to all. 

‘Living Painting: Nature’_ Refik Anadol Opening Kunsthal Rotterdam Friday Night LIVE [Photo: Marco De Swart]

Since the inauguration in 1992, the museum has been following the goal of bringing contemporary art to a broader public and engaging with different conversations. The museum’s structure allows combining more than one exhibition at once, encouraging different types of audience to encounter a diverse perspective through arts. Starting with an introductory speech to the exhibition, Refik Anadol’s opening included music and performances while visitors could freely walk around the museum space.

In Hall 1, the solo exhibition ‘Living Painting: Nature’ spread across a huge black room. On the lateral walls, colourful digital paintings represented Californian landscapes transformed into captivating digital generative patterns. While visitors were captured by the dynamic evolutions, they couldn’t immediately understand the complex technical processes behind the paintings. Keeping walking around in the room, a massive screen explained how the artist’ studio collected and transformed data into beautiful living paintings. The generative patterns are the result of data gathered from wind sensors in Los Angeles, images from California’s national park, and public forecast of data collected from the Pacific Ocean. Transforming multiple data with fluid dynamics techniques to visualize data patterns, the artist pushes technical limits further than processing different dataset to imagine new narratives for the future. 

‘Living Painting: Nature’_ Refik Anadol Opening Kunsthal Rotterdam [Photo: Marco De Swart]

‘Living Painting: Nature’_ Refik Anadol Opening Kunsthal Rotterdam [Photo: Marco De Swart]

Rather than focusing the exhibition on the complex computational processes and interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to create the artworks, the show illustrated how we can imagine our relationship with technology differently, and finding a new agency as humans by playing and experimenting with machines. Opposite to the main screen, almost unnoticeable at a first glance, the iconic Infinity Room stood in the middle of the room. Walking into a small door leading to a black box, visitors were suddenly immersed in a boundless digital world generating itself. Giving the impression of being suspended between generative patterns and coluor, the audience could be immersed into evolving drawings, almost forgetting the physical limits of the small box. 

‘Living Painting: Nature’_ Refik Anadol Opening Kunsthal Rotterdam

Leaving the exhibition, visitors could also listen to an artist’s talk at Erasmus Rotterdam University about his projects and processes, making new connections between the works of the exhibition. As curator Shehera Grot mentioned, Refik Anadol is one of the pioneering artists working with artificial intelligence, pushing the boundaries of technology with creativity and experimentation. With a background in architecture and design, his signature is eluding physical space’s limits transforming buildings and rooms with generative patterns. Collaborating with an interdisciplinary studio, Anadol’s work translates  complex computational processes with AI and data collection into interactive and aesthetic experiences. 

The exhibition played with the intimacy of the curatorial set up and the idea of infinite profundity of the artworks. Presenting these digital explorations as paintings, visitors could imagine a different future with technology, without being intimidated by complexity of the process. The work of the artist and the intimate set up represents the intention of the museum of opening its door to everyone and making contemporary art accessible to the local community. Rather than presenting the overwhelming complexity of the topic, the exhibition space presents these technologies in an interactive and less intimidating form, opening new conversations on our relationship with technology and the future. 

Furthermore, visitors could walk through the AI WeiWei solo exhibition ‘In Search of Humanity,’ focusing on complex social issues concerning human rights and freedom, and the group show ‘Fancy Some Friction, Honey?,’ illustrating Cokkie Snoei Gallery’s works. Presenting a variety of contemporary art, the museum encourages a mix of audience and conversations, using art practices as a starting point to make new connections about the present and a different understanding of our evolving society.