In Basel, Wilde Gallery currently presents Daniel Canogar’s solo exhibition Hidden Tides. It’s Daniel Canogar’s fourth show with the gallery, and the first in Basel (Switzerland). The exhibition addresses the ubiquity of algorithms, big data, and the technological relics that digitalization leaves behind. In this video, the Director of Wilde Basel, Simmy Swinder Voellmy, provides you with an introduction to the exhibition and the artist. The show runs until January 28, 2022.
Daniel Canogar: Hidden Tides / Wilde Gallery Basel. Exhibition walkthrough and interview with Simmy Swinder Voellmy (Director, Wilde Basel). January 14, 2022.
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Exhibition text
Wilde presents Daniel Canogar’s solo exhibition Hidden Tides, the artist’s first show in Basel, and the fourth with the gallery. The exhibition addresses the ubiquity of algorithms, big data, and the technological relics that digitalization leaves behind.
Daniel Canogar’s work has always observed technology, analyzing its systems, logic, and devices. On the ground floor of the gallery is his series Data Works. Each is a generative artwork that processes real-time information coming from the activity of millions of users online. The works recall historical references, including abstract painting and textile processes, to visualize the excess of information in an electronically-connected society.
Hidden Tides proposes a journey to the past and the ruins that the unstoppable digital wave leaves in its wake. On the gallery’s top floor are ten works from the Latencies series made with obsolete technological devices. Canogar sourced crushed material from an electronic recycling center located near his studio. In their origin, microchips, tactile screens and batteries are produced from extracting minerals such as coltan, tungsten, and silicon. These materials then acquire an artificial and “intelligent” form. When technologies die, the cycle gets reversed. The different components are separated by type and shredded, pulverized, shattered, or otherwise destroyed until they lose any hint of their utilitarian past. The technological icon- object, together with the content of its internal memory, is erased in a destructive and iconoclastic act.
Hidden Tides evokes the creative and destructive cycles of technological production. The smashing, crushing and pulverizing of discarded technologies becomes a new sediment that dissolves any difference or particularity. Thousands of phones, light bulbs or computer components are reduced to dust, becoming an elemental magma that will bring life to new forms and realities yet to come. Is it possible to return to a pristine geological state? How does technological macro-production affect geological cycles and rhythms? Hidden Tides explores the life and death of technologies while taking the pulse of the incessant online informational flux. With a gaze fixed on the past, and another looking to the present, the exhibition tries to imagine our future.
Biography
Born in Madrid (1964), Daniel Canogar ́s life and career have spanned Spain and the USA. His interest in the possibilities of the projected image has led him to create monumental public artworks such as Amalgama El Prado, a generative video-projection projected on the Prado Museum ́s façade (Madrid, 2019) and Storming Times Square, screened on 47 of the LED billboards in Times Square (New York, NY, 2014). He has created permanent public art installations with LED screens, including Dynamo for the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020 (Dubai, 2021), Aqueous at The Sobrato Organization (Mountain View, CA, 2019), and Tendril for Tampa International Airport (Tampa, FL, 2017).
Recent solo shows include Amalgama Phillips at The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C., 2021); Reverberations at Kornfeld Gallery (Berlín, 2021); Latencies at Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt, 2021); Billow at bitforms gallery (New York, NY, 2020) and Melting the Solids at Wilde Gallery (Geneva, 2018). Canogar has exhibited at the Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Offenes Kulturhaus Center for Contemporary Art, Linz; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin; Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul; American Museum of Natural History, New York and Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
