Alicja Kwade (born 1979) lives and works in Berlin.

Kwade’s work investigates and questions the structures of our reality and society and reflects on the perception of time in our everyday life. Her diverse practice is based around concepts of space, time, science and philosophy, takes shape in sculptural objects, video and photography. In 2017 she participated in the 57th Venice Biennale “Viva Arte Viva” curated by Christine Macel and in the Aros Triennale “The Garden – End of Times; Beginning of Times, #3 The Future” in Aarhus.

Select solo exhibitions include: Alicja Kwade: Between Glances, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2019), ParaPivot, The Roof Garden Commission, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019), Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2018), ReReason, YUZ Museum, Shanghai, China (2017), Medium Median, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK and de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, Netherlands (both 2016).

Group shows include: Shape Shifters, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2018), 57th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2017), Me, Schirn Kunstalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2016) and, Mudam, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg (2015).

AR-BEIT series
All at Any Time (AR), 2020, Augmented Reality
Angst (AR), 2020, Augmented Reality
Kreisel (Inception) (AR), 2020, Augmented Reality
MarsMelone (AR), 2020, Augmented Reality

LinienLand, 2019, Augmented Reality

2020, Augmented Reality

Alicja Kwade's augmented reality series consists of four individual sculptures which reference works from the artist’s oeuvre. Unlike their physical counterparts, viewers can interact with and virtually place the works in and outdoors allowing users to engage with Kwade’s works within a new dimension.

In All at Any Time (AR), users are able to drag hypothetical forms of the universe across the screen so they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, referring to the idea of interacting parallel universes.

Referring to the popular proverb, ‘to bury one’s head in the sand’, Angst (AR), an anthropomorphised Kaiser-Idell lamp sticks its head into the ground when the user walks towards it. The sculpture’s curious mannerisms forces an emphatic reaction from the user.

Inspired by The Interpretation of Dreams written by Sigmund Freud in 1899, Kreisel (Inception) (AR) emulates the small silvery spinning top seen in the last frame of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film of the same name. Within the film, the spinning top is used to determine whether they are really ‘awake’ as the characters find themselves trapped in a dream within a dream. However, in Kwade’s work, the spinning top constantly spins, trapping her audience within the dream.

MarsMelone (AR) looks initially like a common watermelon, but on closer inspection, users will notice its stripes run horizontally instead of vertically, emulating the outer surface of mars. Much like the planet itself, the work hovers in space. Users are also able to rotate the object by tapping on it.

2019, Augmented Reality

Produced in collaboration with Acute Art, this immersive work consists of a gridded architecture approximately 36 feet in height, in which massive spheres rotate like planets in orbit. Alicia Kwade considers the structure as a possible multiverse in which each quadrant represents a parallel world within a mathematical, human-made linear system.

Kwade’s AR sculpture presents the first immaterial development of the artist’s ongoing project LinienLand. This iteration moves the project towards a new perceptual experience of art in an increasingly information-based world.

While the digital work is formally related to Kwade’s real-life sculptural installations such as LinienLand (2018) and ParaPivot (2019), the sense of wonderment engendered by the IRL works is displaced onto the illusionism afforded by AR technology and introduces motion as an additional element of the work. Viewed through an app, the work appears to be a substantial structure, but is in fact pure information rendered through complex sets of digital data.

2022
Visions, National Gallery of Singapore (Group exhibition) 
AR.Trail, National Gallery Victoria (Melbourne), Australia (Group exhibition) 
Kaleidoscope Eyes, Leeum Museum of Art (Seoul), South Korea (Group exhibition) 
Kaleidoscope Eyes, Ho-Am Museum of Art (Yongin), South Korea (Group exhibition)

2021 
Mirage: Contemporary Art in Augmented Reality, UCCA, China  (Group exhibition) 
The Looking Glass, The Shed (NY), USA (Group exhibition)

2020
Unreal City, Southbank, London (Group exhibition)

2019
Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances, MIT, USA