The Link Art Center announces the end of activities

After eight years of intense editorial, curatorial and exhibition activity, the Link Art Center announces today the end of its experience as a promoter and distributor of culture. It does so in the serene awareness of having acted as a protagonist, and of having achieved, at least in part, its goal: that of supporting, at national and international level, a greater diffusion and awareness of the “Arts of the Information Age”, as its full name states. The interruption of activities will not, however, mean the end of our online presence: the linkartcenter.eu site, the Link Editions publishing platform, the Link Cabinet online gallery will remain accessible, as testimonies of an experience that still has much to give.

Founded on March 9, 2011 as “Link Center for the Arts of Information Age” by Fabio Paris, Lucio Chiappa and Domenico Quaranta, joined by Matteo Cremonesi in 2014, the Link Art Center acted as a curatorial platform focused on the promotion of contemporary artistic research and critical reflections on the core issues of the information age, through the organization of events, editorial activity, collaboration and networking with individuals, groups, companies and institutions on a local and international level.

The Link Art Center has dedicated itself to these initiatives by consciously operating in a postmedia condition, where on the one hand it is imperative for a cultural organization to recognize, investigate and criticize the impact that the digital shift has had and is having on culture, society, politics and the economy of our time, on the other it is absurd to set any limit of technology or media.

Without physical premises, the Link Art Center has developed, together with the production and international circulation of temporary, large-scale exhibition events and cultural projects, two projects characterized by regular and constant activity: Link Editions, an editorial initiative launched since its foundation; and the Link Cabinet, an online gallery launched in April 2014 and curated by Matteo Cremonesi.

Link Editions

A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, Link Editions was among the first editorial projects to experiment with a distribution model that supports the paper book, printed in print-on-demand and distributed through online distribution channels, with the free download of the book in pdf version, allowing anyone access to our essays, catalogs and artist books. From 2011 to 2019 Link Editions put more than 50 titles into circulation, collaborating with authors such as Dominique Moulon, Adam Rothstein, Mathias Jansson, Brad Troemel, Gene McHugh, Valentina Tanni, Joanne McNeil; artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Miltos Manetas, Michael Mandiberg, Florian Freier, UBERMORGEN, Roberto Fassone, Addie Wagenknecht, Evan Roth, Eddo Stern, Eva & Franco Mattes; and organizations and institutions such as Rhizome, New York; MU, Eindhoven; Aksioma, Ljubljana; Viafarini, Milan; Kunsthaus Langenthal; HEK, Basel; HEAD – Genève and PAF, Olomouc. All our books are and will remain available for free download, online reading and purchase in paper format at https://linkeditions.tumblr.com/. 

Link Cabinet

A single web page that hosts personal exhibitions every two months, presenting site-specific works conceived in relation to the particular exhibition space and the type of experience that this allows, between 2014 and 2019 Link Cabinet has exhibited works by Jonas Lund, DUOX, Mancinelli & Fassone , Addie Wagenknecht, Julian Oliver, Nicolas Maigret, Marco Cadioli, Emilie Gervais, Guido Segni, JODI, Jan Robert Leegte, Mara Cassiani, David Horvitz, Michael Mandiberg, Margot Bowman & Lior Ben Gai, Giovanni Fredi, Morehshin Allahyari, Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Nicholas Sassoon, Gretchen Andrew, Davide Prati, Sebastian Schmieg, Stefano Testa, Eva Papamargariti, Max Dovey, Sofia Braga, Carlo Zanni, Eleonora Roaro, Sara Ludy, Lorna Mills. The archive of works is available at http://www.linkcabinet.eu. 

Exhibitions and Productions

In addition to these two platforms, the Link Art Center has produced events and projects throughout its history, collaborating with institutions such as HeK, Basel; 319 Scholes, New York; Istituto Svizzero di Roma, sede di Milano; Furtherfield Commons, Londra; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; iMAL, Brussels; Espace multimédia Gantner, Bourogne. Between 2015 and 2016, we participated with four other institutions – Aksioma, Drugo more, Abandon Normal Devices and d-i-n-a / The Influencers – to the European project Masters&Servers. Networked Cultures in the Post-Digital Age, recognized as a “success story” by the European Commission.

Among the projects carried out by the Link Art Center, independently or in collaboration with its network of institutions, we mention: Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Digital Age (2011 – 2012, curated by Domenico Quaranta), an exhibition that critically investigated the development of the practices of appropriation and re-use of pre-existing materials in the digital age; the Link Point, a project room that for two years – from September 2012 to June 2014 – offered to various artists – including Marco Cadioli, Adam Cruces, Francesco Fonassi, Elisa Giardina Papa, Marc Lee, Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, Filippo Minelli – a space for production, presentation and dissemination of projects; the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts, a traveling museum consisting of a digital photo frame and a USB stick, which before going missing has hosted exhibitions of artists such as Paul. B. Davis, Martin John Callanan, Thomson & Craighead, traveling from London to Hong Kong; 6PM Your Local Time Europe (2015), a distributed exhibition that involved more than 350 artists and more than 100 locations in 23 European countries; Refresh (2016 and 2018, curated by Fabio Paris), an exhibition project aimed at enhancing the Italian digital scene on a national and international level; SITUATIONS/Post Fail (2017 – 2018, curated by Matteo Cremonesi), an exhibition dedicated to the failure of narratives that celebrate technological innovation; Escaping the Digital Unease (2017 and 2018, curated by Raffael Dörig, Domenico Quaranta, Fabio Paris), an exhibition that explored the dimension of digital distress and investigated how artists question new forms of criticism, design independent platforms and tools, and revisit the utopias of the early years of the web; and the project dadaclub.online (2017), which in the centenary of Dadaism has made high-quality digital copies of Dadaist works available for creative reuse online.

See you soon!

With this non-exhaustive list of projects, publications and activities, the Link Art Center thanks all those who have followed our existence with interest and curiosity, and invites you for the last time to use and abuse the contents accessible through our main platform, www.linkartcenter.eu. It was a beautiful, personal as well as intellectual, adventure, a different way to get involved, to try, do, think, build. An adventure that we shared with old and new friends, with personal meetings or digital exchanges; an adventure that has given us – and, hopefully, you – a lot. See you soon!