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MOMENTUM COLLECTION

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MOMENTUM is a non-profit platform for time-based art, active worldwide, with headquarters in Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanien Art Center since 2011. MOMENTUM was founded in Australia as a parallel event to the 17 Biennale of Sydney in 2010. Following the inaugural event in Australia, the MOMENTUM Collection was established in 2010 with an initial donation of 12 video works by 10 artists exhibited at MOMENTUM Sydney. Since then, the Collection has grown to encompass over 150 outstanding artworks by 56 artists from 28 countries worldwide. Representing a diversity of media – video, performance, photography, painting, collage, and text – the MOMENTUM Collection ranges from some of the most established to emerging artists from Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Israel,  Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the UK, and the US.

The ongoing growth of the Collection draws upon the breadth of MOMENTUM’s programming. Since its inception, MOMENTUM has presented over 250 Exhibitions and Events worldwide, through a program composed of local and international Exhibitions, Artist and Curator Residencies, Video Art in Public Space Initiatives, Performance programs, and Education events. Positioned as both a local and global platform, MOMENTUM serves as a bridge joining professional art communities, irrespective of institutional and national borders. Driving MOMENTUM’s program and the development of the Collection is the search for innovative answers to the question ‘What is time-based art?’. By enabling Exhibition, Discussion, Research, Creation, and Exchange, MOMENTUM is a platform which challenges the notion of time-based art in the context of both historical and technological development. Visual languages continue to evolve in concert with the technologies which drive them, and it is the role of visual artists to push the limits of these languages. As the world speeds up, and time itself seems to flow faster, MOMENTUM creates a Collection of contemporary art focused on the growing diversity and relevance of time-based practices, exploring how time-based art reflects the digitization of our societies and the resulting cultural change – a question increasingly relevant in our post-pandemic times.

READ HERE THE MOMENTUM COLLECTION CATALOGUE

ART from ELSEWHERE – The MOMENTUM Collection, Berlin

MOMENTUM enters its second decade in a post-pandemic world radically altered in numerous ways, and yet remarkably unchanged when it comes to aspects of human needs and desires, and our impact upon the planet and one another. In this post-pandemic era of travel restrictions, Art from Elsewhere reframes the MOMENTUM Collection as a selection of works celebrating otherness – a way of seeing the world without travelling. Moving images move us, and artworks serve as windows onto the world. As we now emerge carefully after long periods of isolation, and learn how to negotiate the new realities of a post-pandemic world, it becomes more important than ever to have such windows through which to gaze. In these uncertain times, they remind us that, for all our differences, we are all in this together. The Berlin-based MOMENTUM Collection features artwork by 56 international artists as diverse as Berlin itself. At the geographical center of Europe, Berlin is a city of mobile people and moving images, where art and artists alike are often from elsewhere. The works comprising the MOMENTUM Collection focus on global issues, equally relevant to us all, no matter where we live or where we have come from. They reflect on the social and environmental repercussions of globalization and its impact on the transformation of cultural identities; they interrogate issues of gender, inequality, and poverty; they scrutinize the environmental traumas we inflict on our planet and its creatures; and they ponder the (un)quiet poetry, conflicts, and beauty of how we must live from day to day.