The Exhibition at Hammar Museum, Judith Hopf

This exhibition was presented at the one of the corners in Hammar Museum, and it was shown in a way so amusing. The project was organized by a Berlin-based artist, Judith Hodith. She expressed her idea of how technology has been influencing our life and perception.

While walking through the exhibition, I couldn’t get the meaning which the artist, Judith Hodith, is trying to point out. After reading the program of this exhibition, I totally agree with her and take the credit of her.

The first thing jumped into my sight is the pair of feet which she set as two variations. Both of them were titled Brick-Foot  (all 2016). Hodith used the way of old-school to make the work more like ancient figurative sculpture than minimalist carving. Unlike the contemporary sculptures which are typically full of sense of energetic and modern, even are painted with the impression of colorful abstract, the feet are not as fancy as it was stated, “technically perfect.”   The creation reminded me the previous event I attended: Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art. While our life has been becoming more convenient because so many inventions with advancement technology have been produced, people gradually forget how to use our body physically. For instance, people are lazy to walk since we get cars. I feel these feet ironically express the meaning of “heavy” that our feet are heavy enough to lift them up for walking because we are using the easier way- driving, instead of walking.

Another work that caught my eye is a series of paintings of laptops, which was titled “In Waiting Laptops.” Obviously, our lifestyle has been changed because of more and more high-tech devices. Laptop is one of those. The pictures of laptops which were drawn by Hopg are “anthropomorphized, sporting faces, hair, legs, arms, and personalized accessories such as shoes, sunglasses, and hats.” Yes, we cannot deny that we are using our laptops to do most of things that people did before the age of internet. Laptops are treated as human beings that they are doing the jobs which human should do physically, such as shopping, social contact, and so on. It is so true that Hoph addressed for her works, “the overwhelming presence of technology in our lives by contending with the ways in which the now-ubiquitous laptop mediates and enables, but also limits, human interaction.”