Bright Night – In Between
exhibition of net art activities + sound night
panke.gallery, Berlin
23 May 2025
7 pm ~ 4 am
Artists at the exhibition:
Amy Alexander, Vuk Ćosić, Constant Dullaart, Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin, JODI, Olia Lialina, Jonas Lund, Joana Moll, Everest Pipkin, Sebastian Schmieg, Yehwan Song, Miyö van Stenis, Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman
· curated by Sakrowski
Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman:
Ballettikka Internettikka
Internet Ballet (28 March 2002)
video doc (20:42)
📷 Galya Feierman at panke.gallery
DJs & VJs:
Evan Roth, Sakrowski, Oriental Melon, Mimi Kritik, Mezzy Shivers & Arno Schubert, Alma Alloro & Omri Alloro, Jaeho Hwang, Simon Weckert, Sena Oh
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Sakrowski about the exhibition:
This net art group show is part of Bright Night, a sound night curated by panke.gallery. Bright Night refers to the equinox, a fleeting moment of balance, when day and night are briefly equal. It is neither black nor white, but something in between: a space of ambiguity, fragile, flickering, essential, and unnerving.
At a time when public discourse often forces us into binaries – with us or against us – it feels urgent to preserve spaces for complexity and contradiction. This exhibition reflects the tension between openness and refusal, freedom and responsibility, a tension that defines our present moment.
We are witnessing the end of an era, one of comfort, excess, and careless consumption. We took without restraint, without regard, until abundance ran dry. That has made us complicit, knowingly or not. Bright Night becomes a space for grief and self-reflection.
The minimalist net art works presented here hold a quiet power. They are dense, intense signs of a living, breathing art. They move between formal abstraction and narrative forms, bridging the radical with the social, the political, the cultural, activating the affective force of art.
Net art was born on small screens, the 14-inch desktop monitor, and now mostly exists within the 6-inch confines of mobile devices. And yet, it has lost none of its impact. The best net art was always rebellious, in form, in perception, in how it was received. It resisted the logics of capitalism and lived intensely the hopes and fears of the coming networked age. Today, we inhabit an algorithmic regime: networked surveillance capitalism, extractive systems accelerated by war, preserving narcissistic freedoms for the few at the top of the hierarchy.
Art, however, still holds the power to shape identities, to lay the foundation for a new, more just society. Perhaps no single genre can carry this potential alone. But the fusion of gallery and club, of image and sound, opens a different kind of space: one that might offer joy, ignite hope, and momentarily dispel the fog of loss and loneliness.
Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it’s a new beginning.
intima • Igor Štromajer 