Ivonne Thein – hands of god

In the organizer's words:

In her solo exhibition "hands of god", artist Ivonne Thein juxtaposes two works in which the effects of technology on the image of man are inscribed.
The earlier photo series "bustum" and the video installation "the hand of god", which gives the exhibition its title, refer in particular to art-historical myths and pictorial traditions that have perpetuated the idea of the ingenious artistic and creative act for several centuries. At the center of this narrative is the hand, which is given a special symbolic effect in artists' self-portraits - as a central moment of demarcation between genius creation and artistic craft.
For her new video installation, Ivonne Thein has invited various AIs to depict and describe the human hand from a cultural and historical perspective. In combination with sculptures by the artist, a multi-layered over- and rewriting of the art-historical and artistic discourse on creative genius is created, which, in view of the use of machine learning systems, is more shaky than ever.
In the juxtaposition with her earlier photo series "bustum", Ivonne Thein opens up another perspective, because here the focus is on photography as an artistic means of manipulation, which almost 100 years ago moved Walter Benjamin to write his text "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" and whose manipulability still questions the authenticity of the image today.

For Ivonne Thein, whose work deals with the human body in the digital age, traditional notions of perfection and wholeness have been overcome. Using a cross-media approach, she transforms the plastic body into a manipulable mass.