On Saturday May 23, join us on Zoom for WYD?, an intimate and informal monthly gathering where members of the extended NAVEL community come together to present, test, perform, share, screen and talk about their work, practice, thoughts and current research topics.

Organized and curated by the artist and Collective Resident Nina Sarnelle, WYD?(Out There) is a twist on our regular WYD? event, which usually takes place at our space in LA. Without the ability to gather in person at the moment, we are taking the opportunity to invite artists, who are not based in LA, to present about their work to the NAVEL community.

Presenters include
Laura Hyunjhee Kim (Boulder, CO)
Vanja Smiljanić (Cologne, Germany)
Lukas Marxt (Cologne, Germany)
Isla Hansen (NY/Pittsburgh)

Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who performs moments of incomprehension and feelosophically explores consumer technologies and (non)human interaction. In 2017, she was one of the inaugural artists-in-residence at the Internet Archive and in 2020, she received the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and the Black Cube Video Art Award. Kim is the author of “Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, ” a book on blobs published with The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2019.
Website
IG: @lauraonsale
Image credit: Laura Hyunjhee Kim, [Thinkalot]: Fall Asleep While You Think, Video Still, 2018

Vanja Smiljanić (Belgrade, RS 1986) is a visual and performance artist living and working in Cologne. In her practice, she often utilizes the model of performance-lecture as a way to bridge fictitious and experiential universes, comprising technical apparatus, diagrams and sci-fi povera sculptures. Connecting otherwise unparalleled reality systems, Vanja’s work attests the foundation of ideologies as alienated regimes, recurring to her own body as a vessel for narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.
Website
IG: @vanjathe_minister
_Image credit: Vanja Smiljanić, Orion Debacle, Experimental documentary, 29:04 min, 2019 (video still)

Lukas Marxt is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt’s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Website
Image credit: Lukas Marxt, Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) video still, 2018

Isla Hansen is an artist working to reinterpret and complicate the relationship between the human body and technological progress. She combines soft materials, digital fabrication processes, real time media, and techniques from online DIY culture to blur consumer-producer boundaries and challenge the way in which industrial forms of production position the human body as analogue. Isla teaches sculpture in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Website
IG: @islaaaaaaa
Image credit: Isla Hansen, ryan kelly