The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation is delighted to announce the opening of Low Res: Spatial Politics inthe Cloud, a group exhibition curated by Alvaro Luis Lima and Nicole Siegenthaler, winners of the 2016 NARS Emerging Curator Program Open Call. Low Res: Spatial Politics in the Cloud exhibits six artists who address the nature of space in the digital age: Dan Halter, Faith Holland, Devin Kenny, Paula Nacif, Tabita Rezaire and Nicolas Sasson. New mass media tools – like the president’s Twitter account – have unprecedented roles in the global circulation of power. Sad! Resisting the old myth that tech erodes borders, the exhibition explores how the digital age has broadened the notion of space, even while reinforcing traditional hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class and nationality.

Some artists in Low Res investigate how space is shaped by the digital while others focus on how the internet creates sites of their own. In both cases, the artists instrumentalize the aesthetics of “low resolution,” playing with the language of the early internet, and with gifs, YouTube, video games and advertising. With ambivalence to the gentrified media built by Silicon Valley, they explore what is low-tech, comic, pornographic, trashy and outdated about the digital space. This aesthetics evokes many questions on the politics of space: from illegal immigration to black feminist diasporas to the distance between audience and art institutions. If you still don’t get it, don’t hold back: Google it!

Álvaro Luís Lima is a PhD candidate in Art History and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Nicole Siegenthaler is the Fair Producer at FNB JoburgArtFair in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has worked for various international art fairs including Independent, Art Dubai and Frieze.