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PRESS RELEASE — Text From the artist

It’s a new body of work. The work extends over about 115 frames. The frames contain close-ups of my body. Text is lasered onto the glass of the frames. The content is about the loss of our true knowledge, through algorithms and the generation of texts and the manipulation of news, our facts become more blurred than ever before, in addition there are fake facts that also burn themselves in, are regenerated again and again, the AI continue to generate texts from themselves and thus blur the knowledge. 

Humans, as rather comfortable beings, are using text generation more and more, as well as all the other digital possibilities that are supposedly making life easier, and are thus becoming more and more dependent on the internet and the large corporations behind it. I am convinced that knowledge, free thinking and, consequently, our actions come from our bodies and from what we carry within us. Knowledge is physical, we carry knowledge within us and use it to form our opinions, our sense of right and wrong, our premonitions and our judgements. Emotionality and empathy are also based on knowledge, which we have in our bodies and react to or call up physically. So there is our body and the body of knowledge, which I superimpose or connect in the work. The violation of knowledge is therefore also a violation of our body, and of our free actions. 

The text is written between hurt, warning, worry, disappointment and physical reaction. I believe that this loss of knowledge in the body is a central theme of our time and a catastrophe that is only just beginning but threatens our humanity enormously (in addition to the climate and wars and the current world situation), so I consider the work to be quite important in my discourse and also a question of where we are developing as human beings, also away from each other. The importance and urgency of the topic is also clear from the number of framings, I think we are heading towards a problem that unfortunately the majority of people are underestimating, but will soon no longer be reversible, if at all possible now, so we have to speak up now and address this problem.  

It will be combined with the new work with the video ‘believers’ (2023).  This is an artificially generated church service, as is sometimes practised in churches in Korea. A generated sermon on the subject of body soul mind is spoken, which leads itself ad absurdum, as the generated sermon emphasises the coming together of people and the human counterpart as the basis of the community. The ‘priests’ who recite the sermon are also all generated. I think this combination of AI and faith and the body could be a good field of tension. In the animation, I have also included a sculpture of a mould of a reborn, a baby doll that imitates a real child. And probably stands as a placeholder for a loss. 

Louisa Clement

password: Louisaclement2024 

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The recipient of 2024 Bonn Art Award, Louisa Clement, has long achieved international success, extending far beyond the city limits of Bonn, her birthplace and chosen home. Initially recognized for her highly topical photographic works, Clement has continuously broadened her artistic spectrum. Her oeuvre encompasses sculptural objects, robotic clones with autonomous existence, and capsules containing the artist’s synthetic DNA. Throughout her artistic journey, Louisa Clement has consistently explored the intersection of human presence within the artificial and the artificial within the human.
For her exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, the artist has crafted two captivating yet unsettling video works: “Off-Target Effect” and “Believers” (both 2023). While the former reflects on the prospects and perils of molecular biological gene-editing techniques, the latter presents AI-generated individuals delivering eerily compelling AI-generated sermons. Both works delve into the question: Where do the boundaries between artificiality and humanity lie, and how can we discern them?

Louisa Clement (born in 1987 in Bonn) has exhibited in numerous institutions and museums worldwide. From 2010 to 2015, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a master student under Andreas Gursky. The artist currently lives and works in Bonn.

Since 2019 the Bonn Art Award, which is awarded every two years, is additionally supported, by a working stipend in a foreign country and by an acquisition from the exhibition, thanks to the generosity of the Bonn couple Dr. Stephanie and Wolfgang Bohn.

SOURCE FOR THE BIO: KUNST MUSEUM BONN