Nina Sobell - Curated by Evelin Stermitz :: July 9 - August 1, 2008 :: Opening reception: July 8 2008; 7:00 pm :: Gallery AREA 53, Gumpendorferstrasse 53, A-1060 Vienna [Art project AREA 53 by TWO PEOPLE ONE WORK - Karin Sulimma and Mounty R. P. Zentara]

The exhibition shows video works by the artist Nina Sobell in an inter-relative performative context.
During the exhibition Nina Sobell creates a sculptural installation in an open atelier space as an in-gallery project. “Working with time, perception, exploring cognitive theories as art, led me further into the non-static world of video. At this point, I needed to retreat into an intimate personal dialogue, making sculpture for video camera space only, compressing time and private experience.” - Nina Sobell

Nina Sobell pioneered the use of video, computers, and interactivity in art, as well as performance on the Web. Since 1969, when she first used video to document participants’ undirected interactions with her sculptures, she investigates the extent to which video enables her to manipulate the relation between time and space, and to create a vortex for human experience, in which the mediated event coincides with public experience, memory and relationships. Groundbreaking projects include ParkBench and VirtuAlice, and the ongoing Interactive Encephalographic Brainwave Drawings. Sobell presented Brainwave Drawings and Videophone Voyeur (1977) at Joseph Beuys’ Free International University at Documenta 6. She received awards from the NEA and NYSCA for her pioneering video performance art in the 1970’s. Her work has been shown throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. An award-winning printmaker and figurative sculptor, and avid improvisational guitarist and keyboardist, she can be seen sculpting Emily in the ParkBench Performance Archives and heard playing music there as well. During the years 2007 - 2008 Nina Sobell is Artist in Residence at Location One in New York, supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her works are included in the exhibition California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2008.

As a New York-based artist, Nina Sobell has produced a broad body of work embracing various themes, strategies, and mediums, including video, performance, installation, sculpture and live TV. A participant in the feminist performance movement of the 1970s, her conceptually based work ranges from taboo performances and museum installations to interactive video matrixes for public participation. Sobell began using video in the 1970s as a way to study spectators’ interactions with her sculptures, which were placed anonymously in public areas. Exploring video-sculpture, Sobell was intrigued with creating psycho-social transformations via video technology, making environments and mobile structures to physically engage the viewer. Pursuing video’s relation to the subconscious led Sobell to her well-known Brainwave Drawing piece, in which a screen monitor registered the brainwaves of two people and their silent attempt to communicate with each other.

Nina Sobell discovered that the very presence of technology alters peoples’ behavior, due to its capacity to mediate experience, to manipulate space and time, and due also to peoples’ belief in its power. She has used these phenomena to sculpt social space. In other words, she has used technology as a prop to give participants permission to overcome various types of boundaries — physical and social — to communicate with one another.