Michel Majerus Estate
Address
Knaackstrasse 12 | 10405 Berlin
Open Saturdays, 11am – 6pm or by appointment
Current exhibition
© Michel Majerus Estate, 2024
Let’s Play Majerus G3
a project by Cory Arcangel
April 27, 2024 – March 15, 2025
Open Saturdays, 11am – 6pm or by appointment
The Michel Majerus Estate is pleased to announce Let’s Play Majerus G3, a project featuring a previously unexplored aspect of the artist’s archive: his computer. An initiative led by artist Cory Arcangel, Let’s Play Majerus G3 takes as its point of departure the laptop that Majerus used in his late career, now reactivated following a restoration undertaken in cooperation with digital-art organization Rhizome.
By examining this crucial tool, Let’s Play Majerus G3 — an expansive program comprising the exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate, a talk, a performance and a YouTube series — allows unprecedented access to Majerus’ digital studio and the approaches that informed it, representing a revolutionary development in the understanding of his oeuvre, and allowing a uniquely first-hand glimpse, through the eyes of a fellow artist, into this rich primary source.
The project at the Michel Majerus Estate, in exploring and presenting Majerus’ computer, foregrounds the technological challenge of re-accessing a wealth of information thought to be lost. It lends consideration to the increasingly prominent role of archiving digital materials and interrogates the ways in which these holdings crucially factor into authoring art-historical narratives surrounding 21st-century protagonists.
Let’s Play Majerus G3 is accompanied by an in-person and online program. The exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate features works by Arcangel that span nearly two decades, including new commissions displayed alongside selected works by Majerus in a juxtaposition that suggests a continuity in non-concurrent, albeit conceptually linked, bodies of work.
On YouTube, Arcangel — in his debut as a “YouTuber” — posts “Let’s Play” videos that feature him as he navigates Majerus’ computer as part of this project. These videos are also presented on the Michel Majerus Estate’s website and by Rhizome as part of their series of presentations on digital-art archival, “ArtBase Anthologies.”
The project was accompanied by a public conversation between Cory Arcangel and Dragan Espenschied during Gallery Weekend Berlin at the Michel Majerus Estate. It was followed by a new iteration of Arcangel’s performance The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound (2015 – ongoing), performed by Lena Willikens. The performance took place in September 2024 during Berlin Art week at silent green, Berlin.
Let’s Play Majerus G3 was created in cooperation with Rhizome, an artist-founded platform for presenting, researching, and preserving digital art. The emulation of Majerus’ computer, developed by OpenSLX, was overseen by Dragan Espenschied (Preservation Director at Rhizome) and Mona Ulrich. The project is supported by grants from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), from the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) at the Zurich University of the Arts, and from Arcangel Surfware, a software and merchandise publisher founded by Arcangel in 2014.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978, Buffalo, US) is an artist living and working in Stavanger, Norway. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2022); Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); Hamburger Bahnhof — Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2010) and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2005).
Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship and digital art conservation. Founded in 1996 by artist Mark Tribe as an email discussion list including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum in New York City.
Extended Press Release: English | German
For further information please contact the Michel Majerus Estate:
[email protected]
Press inquiries:
[email protected]
+49 30 47377300
Michel Majerus 2022 – Catalog
A comprehensive publication is now available to accompany the Germany-wide exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022, which was dedicated to various phases and aspects of Michel Majerus’ (1967 – 2002) extraordinary oeuvre twenty years after his death.
The exhibition series featured five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and at neugerriemschneider in Berlin, offering new insights into Michel Majerus’ early work as well as the medial and topical questions posed throughout his body of work. Parallel to these exhibitions in Berlin and Hamburg, thirteen museums throughout Germany showed works by Michel Majerus from their collections.
Check out michelmajerus2022.com for further information.