The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York City has named the three winners of its Community Curation competition, which will grant blockchain artists whose works are largely motion-based an exhibition on its lobby walls.
In the coming weeks, Ceren Su Çelik, Anna Malina, and Rodell Warner will meet with MoMI staff curators to select works to be displayed on the Schlosser Media Wall at the Queens institution. Located in the former studio complex for Paramount (originally known as Famous Players-Lasky) built in the 1920s, the museum opened in 1988 and underwent a $67 million renovation in 2008.
The community-selected blockchain artworks will join 130,000 artifacts relating to film, television, and time-based media held in the museum’s permanent collection.
“With a still image, you can, in some way, see all of it at once,” Warner, a Trinidad-born visual artist, told Hyperallergic. “With moving images, you can’t behold the entire image at once. It takes time to reconstruct the image in your mind or put the pieces together.”
Earlier this month, MoMI published a shortlist of 10 artists based on nominations by what the museum called “blockchain advocates” and held a voting session via Typeform survey from September 11 to September 22. The project is sponsored by the foundation of the decentralized digital art blockchain Tezos, according to a MoMI spokesperson.
Çelik, a Turkish artist, introduces “cyborgs and hybridized elements” to “investigate the coevolution of humanity and technology in the modern world,” per an artist statement. Her 2024 work “It Will Follow You” combines artificial reflections, fuzzy paint strokes, fruit, trash bags, and frightening two-legged creatures.
“Her work delves into how technology reshapes identities and bodies in a dynamic digital landscape,” wrote Grida, Çelik’s nominator.
Selected artist Molina’s 2023 work “Kollaps” cycles through various phases of a distorted face as it crumbles like a piece of paper.
“Through her chosen subjects … she injects subjectivity and poetry into a medium and aesthetic realm that can sometimes come across as unfeeling or inhuman,” said Molina’s nominator, who goes by Vincent Van Dough.
Warner told Hyperallergic that he has been documenting plants in the United States over the course of five years, often rendering them in what he calls “simulated glass vessels.”
“That way, I can kind of keep them,” Warner said, “and look at them and share them with others.”
Warner also views his digital art practice as a way to stay connected to Trinidad. He alters archival images of the Caribbean — many of which he said portray Carribeans “almost as machinery, less like humans”— to disrupt early photographic narratives of his homeland.
The exhibition will open at MoMI on November 22, when visitors will also have the opportunity to “mint” or record on the blockchain a fragment of the digital art as a souvenir.
