Link in Bio

Social media has fundamentally changed our daily lives and modes of social interaction. The digital realm continues to offer users new and unprecedented possibilities of communication, networking and self-presentation. Platforms like Tumblr and Instagram have given way to new visual cultures and practices with regard to how we view art and photography. Communication via images, memes and emojis is becoming a lingua franca in the globalised (networked) world, and art can be viewed anytime and anywhere.

Many young artists find their audiences nowadays where they themselves are at home as digital natives – in social media. Since the early web artists of the 1990s and the post-Internet art craze, a new generation of artists now explicitly responds to social media and its content and develops new innovative working methods and forms of artistic expression. Artists like Almalia Ulman, Andy Kassier and Tom Galle are creating visual and performative works which reveal the mechanisms of self-presentation in social networks, challenge stereotypes and criticise the digital age with a healthy dose of self-irony.

The exhibition “Link in Bio. Art in the Age of Social Media” at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig shines a spotlight on this new generation of artists. Based on more than 50 works, it addresses how the production and reception of art has changed in the age of social media and what it means to be an artist today at a time when digitalisation has infiltrated almost every aspect of life. The presentation curated by Anika Meier is designed as a follow-up exhibition to “Virtual Normality” (2018) and features installations, photography, sculptures, videos and paintings by such internationally renowned artists as Aram Bartholl, Arvida Byström, Constant Dullaart and Tom Galle.

Curator: Anika Meier
Artists:Aram Bartholl, Arvida Byström, Nadja Buttendorf, Anna Ehrenstein, Andy Kassier, Andy Picci, Florian Meisenberg, Filip Custic, Leah Schrager, Tom Galle, Chris Drange, Viktoria Binschtok, Constant Dullaart and others