Till Langschied | 2021 Residency
Mainland China | Visual Arts
July 1 to September 28, 2021 — Visual Arts
Nationality: Switzerland
Residency location: Basel and Berlin
Partner organization: Home Residency
Till Langschied is a visual artist who lives in Basel, Switzerland, and works in a variety of media. He studied at the AMD Düsseldorf and under Chus Martinez at the Institut Kunst HGK in Basel where he graduated with a degree in Fine Arts.
His artistic research focuses on the desires and dreams of humanity and on how these are projected onto an “other” – namely technology and nature. His work explores the constantly evolving relationships between virtual and analogue spaces, operating at the boundaries of these realms. He develops many of his works in digital formats and then transforms them into physical objects and installations, in order to question the agency of the virtual.
Within his practice he developed the performance character Till Tumaroh, which he uses as an avatar on various levels within his work. Tumaroh’s written manifesto was published by Éditions Extensibles, Paris, and performed as a lecture performance at the Librairie du Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Dampfzentrale in Bern.
Langschied’s work has been exhibited internationally and in 2020 he was invited for the Lago Mio residency in Lugano, Switzerland.
“My work focuses on the relation between humans and technology. Within the last decade, this relationship has drastically changed due to the rise of the smartphone. These changes were rapid in a historical context but tend to feel organic for the users of new technologies. This reshaping is why for the residency in China I aim to investigate how Chinese culture has changed within the last ten years due to its exposure to new technologies. I lived in Suzhou in 2010 and worked in a textile factory. Back then I got a glimpse into the daily life of Chinese middle-class employees. I want to employ this background knowledge to visit people and places I knew back then to learn how their realities have changed in the decade that has passed.
To negotiate the human body as an interface for smart technology, I developed a performance called ‘Palm readying of Tumaroh’, which uses a specially developed system of palmistry to ‘read’ peoples’ palms as a way to deceiver their digital selves.
As a next step, this performance should be developed into a video work and VR experience. The research I want to conduct in China regarding peoples’ relation to their smart technology and also their exposure to the avant-garde technology, which can be found in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, will help me to sharpen my concept and give me the opportunity to develop new multimedia works around these ideas.”
