—The Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology is proud to announce its major end-of-year exhibition and symposium, In the Middle, a Chimera, taking place from May 5th to the 18th with a warm-up segment from April 21st to May 4th. The Institute will be partnering with artist-run centre Eastern Bloc and Indigenous artist-run centre daphne for the exhibition, and the international contemporary art gallery Fondation PHI for a workshop featuring US researcher/artist Caroline Sinders. Additional international participating artists will be announced at a later date. The programming will begin with the book launch for Chris Salter’s Sensing machines: How sensors shape our everyday life & Sofian Audry’s Art in the Age of Machine Learning (both MIT Press) at Anteism on April 21st.
Though theoretically an exhibition, In the Middle’s structure will feel more like that of a biennale: a dynamism will imbue these two weeks, bringing viewers to see affixed projects and ephemeral endeavours throughout the city. This will all take place concurrently with a symposium segment (May 13th) where Milieux researchers and alumnae will present their current projects
The exhibition/symposium marks the first show for the Institute since 2018’s Sights of Feeling, and the first event of its kind for Milieux. The approach for In the Middle, a Chimera is to shift the organizational strategy to horizontally oriented project planning, with an emphasis placed on mutual exchange and community-building. Milieux has selected institutions and spaces to work with based on their varied positions with the idea that they could all mutually benefit from collaborating with each other. This applies as well to the curatorial approach: emerging artists/student members selected will exhibit alongside more established artists, bringing to the first advantageous visibility and the promise of future opportunities, and to the latter new ideas from the forthcoming artists generation.
In the Middle, a Chimera considers how new, breakthrough technology developed under the veil of capitalism inevitably bends to its whirling, maelstrom pull (sometimes despite more communitarian originary intentions): the goal of this exhibition/project is to envision and develop community-oriented futures where this pull is redirected towards mutually beneficial relationships, and ways in which we might undermine or re-conceptualize these technologies to not only nurture ourselves but our surrounding ecosystems and environments.
