Ania Soliman

Explaining Dance to a Machine, 2017. Exhibition view Galerie Sfeir-Semler Hamburg

Born in Warsaw in 1970, Ania Soliman spent the first 16 years of her life in Cairo and Baghdad before leaving Paris, London and ultimately the US. Her artistic practice is influenced by her rich cultural background, yet it relies heavily on science and research. From an almost futuristic perspective, Soliman questions the processes of thought and action. ,

Soliman's projects are fueled by an endless curiosity on various topics. The ideas generated by the rigorous research are instigated by both intellectual and physical experiences in the artistic process. The resulting work is accordingly multi-faceted. On the one hand, it represents a process guided by the subconsciousness of the artist, on the other, it has an intense analytical and empirical methodology. Soliman addresses Sigmud Freud's theory of the subconscious acts as the actual automaton of human action. Alternatively, the tangible object also plays an important role. As part of her exhibition at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel in 2014, the artist created works tackling the objects from the anthropological collection of the museum. Pointing to the peculiarities of their origins, Soliman questions their importance in the context of social development and notes how the image of man as a machine, which is strongly present in European tradition, has changed over the centuries. The artist is interested both in the human body as a machine in economic processes, and in the increasingly present topic of artificial intelligence.

Her current project Explaining Dance to a Machine focuses on precisely this topic. The starting point of the project were dance notations developed in the 1920s by the Hungarian choreographer, Rudolf von Laban, who designed a system meant to analyze physical movement. The series of encaustic drawings represents how the system captures activity sequences of biological entities, namely movement, and made them reproducible. The works serve as a metaphor for what it means to program a material entity to think, bringing up questions of how and what we communicate to the machine, but also the programming of our own embodiment.

Ania Soliman lives and works between Paris and New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (2015), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (2015), at the Whitney Biennale (2010), at the 14th Istanbul Biennale (2015), the Museum of Cultures in Basel 2014) and the Drawing Center in New York (2000, 2002).