Outside Form

In this interview, Marie-France Rafael and the artist Raphaela Vogel probe the perennial question of form, asking: What is the relationship between form and time? In their conversation, Rafael and Vogel contemplate the potential of putting artistic mediums in dialogue with one another, proffering a new vision of what form can achieve.
Since the 2010s, the line between public and private, online and offline have increasingly become blurred by digitalization and social media. In contemporary art, digitality has assumed a new type of presence—no longer only as a virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our embodied experiences. What is presented in an "exhibition"? And how should we write about the new types of post-digital images we are seeing (in them)?
In Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age, Marie France Rafael provides an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it. Rafael aims to retrace the living spirit of art and the procedural-performative experience of art in her writing.
Marie-France Rafael (born 19984 in Munich) is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She holds a PhD in art history; she studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. She is notably the author of Reisen im Imaginativ: Künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Travel in the Imaginary: Artistic Situations and Displays, 2017) and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Music on Display (2016).
Raphaela Vogel is a Berlin-based artist working primarily in video, installation, and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, Kunsthalle Basel, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Berlinische Galerie, and the 2022 Venice Biennale.