Inspired by…

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel (next to our colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp).

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.

The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 11 October 2022

SU Yu Hsin

The fifth event of the Inspired by… will be online via zoom meeting hosted by Art Laboratory Berlin. In this session, SU Yu Hsin, Taiwanese artist and filmmaker shares her recent collaboration with Australian dancer and choreographer Angela GOH. Tidal Variations is a video installation, co-commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab. The artists dig into the history of the site, re-imagining it – as a speculative data center drifting on water where undersea cables converge, and a screen-like surface that reflects water and light. Under COVID-19, the windows became a symbol of enclosure and isolation. People looked out the window to the street, and also encountered one another as digital framed images. The artists examine Glass Walls and the engineering structure of the Sydney Opera House to map the Internet infrastructure and optical fiber network: the data light crosses the bottom of the sea and reaches the path of people’s glass screens.

SU Yu Hsin chose two inspirational texts to discuss and present her collaborative work Tidal Variations which is available on Sydney Opera House’s website.

SU Yu Hsin (b.1989) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. She approaches ecology from the point of view of its close relationship with technology. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork where she investigates the political ecologies of water and reflects on technology and the critical infrastructure in which the human and non-human converge. Her analytical and hydropoetic storytelling focuses on map-making, operational photography, and the technical production of geographical knowledge. Her film and video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and International Art Biennials: the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Taipei Biennial 2020, ZKM Karlsruhe, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Recently she has her solo exhibition Wet Mechanics of Seeing at Kunsthalle Winterthur.

Reading Materials

1) Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 247–64.

2) Zylinska, Joanna. ‘WATERKINO and HYDROMEDIA: How to Dissolve the Past to Build a More Viable Future’. In Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, edited by Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling, 220–43. Open Humanities Press, 2020.


Venue: Zoom meeting. The texts will be shared with the registered participants.

Inspired by… reading club meetings are not recorded to create a safe space for guest artists and participants to talk about their practice.