Penelope Umbrico: Out of Order Exhibition

Exhibition Details

Starting with images found on “consumer-to-consumer” selling platforms, Umbrico addresses themes such as the materiality of technology, its inevitable obsolescence, and the role of the Internet as a social archive.

Hundreds of computers pile up, collapsing on top of each other. On them we see human figures projected, as unintended as ghostly - they are the owners of the screens photographed and offered for sale online. Images of the sun merge, turning our main light source into a cloud of pixels. Bar codes of LCD screens represent signs of machine-to-machine conversations. What weight does the materiality of technology have in our lives? What clues do the pictures we upload online hold? In Out of Order, images found on platforms such as eBay, Craigslist and Alibaba are evidence of much more than what they show.

We constantly move between producer and consumer, local and global, individual and collective. We observe the ubiquitous presence of screens in our existence. We look at hyper-consumption trends and their environmental impact while the estimated e-waste amounts to 60 billion kilograms per year. An immense work of analysis and mapping that draws our attention to the continuous changes in technology, and to how we change with it.

About the Author

Penelope Umbrico (USA, 1957)’s work has been exhibited in the USA at MoMA PS1 and Museum of Modern Art in New York, at MassMoCA in Massachusetts, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin among others; internationally, it was displayed at Art Museum Gosta in Finland, at Foto Colectania in Barcelona, Spain, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, UK, at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen in Germany, at the Rencontres d’Arles in France, at the Daegu Photography Biennale in Korea, at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, and at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her monographs have been published by Aperture and RVB Books.

Where

Main Location - Spazio Bianco, DumBO

Via Camillo Casarini, 19 – Bologna

Penelope Umbrico Out of Order

Exhibition Details

About the Author

Where

Main Location - Spazio Bianco, DumBO

Penelope Umbrico
Out of Order