On February 3, 2020, SIGNS, a commercial art gallery in Istanbul, opened a group exhibition including works by various international artists. Each of the pieces featured in the show had a relationship with the sense of touch. Little did the curator know that a few days after the exhibition opening, the COVID-19 pandemic would cause the gallery to close its doors and would, in turn, frame physical contact as one of the most pressing issues of our new reality.

Touch has been a fundamental expression of connection in most cultures around the world. But in this time of global pandemic, when shaking hands or hugging someone may never make a comeback, countless art institutions and museums have been temporarily shuttered while virtual galleries have quickly taken over their websites. The show “When You Touch About Me, I Think Myself” suggests that non-tactile contact might have been in the air for quite some time and leaves us asking a few fundamental questions about the way we perceive the world today.

This is a pivotal moment in the art world. Technology has allowed us to digitally visit and experience galleries while being quarantined inside our homes. American critic Douglas Crimp interprets this shift in contemporary art, and claims that, “to an ever-greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures firsthand, the experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. It, therefore, becomes imperative to understand the picture itself….”^{Morgan Meis, “The Deceptions of Thomas Demand ,” The Easel, April 23, 2019, https://the-easel.com/essays/the-deceptions-of-thomas-demand/.} The artifacts in “When You Touch About Me, I Think Myself” suggest that our contemporary condition is dominated by fictional renditions of reality, captured through pictures. Unaware of the imminent spread of the pandemic, the curators included in the show a series of pieces by Thomas Demand, Elena Manferdini and Anish Kapoor. Now more than ever, this sequence of works makes a novel case that artists have been tasked with finding effective ways, besides touch, to connect with audiences.

“Things just enter reality through photography”^{“Archive,” Guggenheim, April 16, 2020, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4383.} explains Thomas Demand, a Munich born artist who challenges the notion of what is real, to the point that it is nearly impossible to perceive that the whole setting for his photography consists of life-size architectural models. His picture, Repository (2018), presents what appears to be a lived-in scene from filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s studio. Known for using paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes from various media sources, Thomas Demand creates large scale paper models, photographs then destroys them. “The resulting large‐format prints are representations of a representation of a location that is a part of collective memory for all.”

Atelier Manferdini’s hyper-realistic digital landscapes, which depict a field of colorful Dahlias enriched via Augmented Reality (2020), centers the discussion on the role of photorealism and social media today. The piece is a series of three large, square, printed canvases installed on the wallpaper, a play with multiple scales of perception of pattern-on-pattern that come to life when one looks through the iPhone App that accompanies the artwork. Because of the work’s bi-dimensionality and the augmentation of the phone app, the graphic produces a fictitious space, an internalized view. Butterflies, birds, and insects swarm within the landscape and create an immersive experience for all senses. The viewers physically touch a smooth screen to interact, while visually experiencing a three dimensional, living messa in scena digitally on the tablet. They eventually post their artificially experienced (AR) videos and pictures on social media. The very existence of the beholder emerges in art‐and theater‐ as a fundamental problem of a stage. The theatrical is about the possibility of entering that composition. “Dahlia” is proof that the correlation between photorealistic representation and public engagement through social media has become central to the fruition of art.

The final piece in the show Anish Kapoor’s “Into Yourself, Fall” (2018), produced in collaboration with Acute Art, is cited as a “virtual descent inside the human body, enabled by a VR headset.”

The piece takes us on a journey through the human body, experiencing the sensation of falling into yourself via this immersive medium. Anish Kapoor describes this as a “vertigo” that “descends inward… when you get that headset on, you are in a world of semi‐reality."^{“Into Yourself, Fall by Anish Kapoor,” Waddesdon Manor, n.d., https://waddesdon.org.uk/whats-on/into-yourself-fall-by-anish-kapoor/.} While the piece promises a disorienting sensation of radical introspection, the viewer negotiates intimate contact with what matters inside. “There is a sense of relative frivolity when asked about how we perceive the world,”^{“Anish Kapoor,” Acute Art, https://acuteart.com/artist/anish-kapoor/.} explains Kapoor. Virtual reality has enabled us to conceptualize, visualize and fashion the world inside our heads. It has empowered us to experience the unexperienced.

The sequence of artworks at the SIGNS gallery leads the spectators to question three fundamental assumptions. The first belief to be dismantled in front of Thomas Demand’s piece is the idea of a real experience, an original, or even the truth. These notions are mere concepts from a past era, they were conceived at a time of scarcity of information. In this age of mediated communication though, revealing the truth is not only an anachronistic idea, but it is also no longer an effective engine for change.

Stephen Duncombe, the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, states that, “a growing number of artists are abandoning truth-telling political art for a boldly utopian practice, recognizing that social problems can't be solved by an atrophied collective imagination.”^{Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007).} Although architecture and art biennales traditionally are full of individuals declaring alternative truths, today a critical art practice that has the ambition of igniting change cannot be successful simply by revealing the truth. This critical attitude is a residue from a time in the past when the information was scarce and knowledge meant freedom. Now we live in an era where Wikipedia is constantly updated, where political statements reach social media faster than a newspaper, and where information is just a tap away. In the contemporary world, truth is simply a matter of point of view.

Thomas Demand’s body of work dismantles the assumption that there is an original, that the original has a higher value than its copy. Doubling has become the new normal, it subverts the one-off and glorifies the multiple. Image trafficking is our contemporary way of living. Demand’s artifacts appeal to a theory of similarities rather than originality while exploring the relationship of replicas in our voguish, mediated culture.

The second assumption to be dismantled is that the role of imagination is marginal in our society. The act of imagining an alternative reality is a fundamental cultural and political act performed by architects and artists who recognize that problems can’t be solved by an atrophied collective imagination and that such collective imagination has to be continuously trained. Imagination relies on a brief suspension of disbelief in the audience. For a short instant, the viewers should experience the feeling of WHAT IF! While suspending disbelief, the audience will allow itself to perceive that change and benefit from it. We should not forget that desiring an alternative reality is the inception of any change. Without that desire, there is simply no forward motion toward another option.

In particular, Atelier Manferdini’s proposal for SIGNS focuses on the effectiveness of visual languages in formulating alternative realities. The achievement of “Dahlia” is measured in part by the degree to which it generates a theatrical engagement with the wider public. Realism and the familiarity of nature are not viewed as shortcomings, but rather as crucial ingredients for the success of a living picture. The work is, in this way, grounded in the relationship between artistic production and the viewer’s understanding. These digital landscapes embody a new generation of synthetic environments in which special attention is paid to the literal reproduction of matter, where familiarity is the result of multiple mutations from reality and becomes an indispensable ingredient to establish a connection with the viewers. “Dahlia” is the ground for a new trope of digital sensibility where real and fantastic, familiar and unexpected, still and living are increasingly blurred.

The third assumption to be dismantled when confronted with Anish Kapoor’s piece is that materials have a “true nature” and they should be used accordingly to their physical properties. Recently we have witnessed an interest in materials as a new breed where geometry, texture, coloration, tooling and finish are able to provoke novel sensations. These artificial materials can be described as “synthetic” because they are the outcome of various qualities that are not necessarily true to the physical properties of a specific matter. Rather, they are the combination of multiple stratifications, whether by design or through natural processes. A growing arsenal of digital techniques has blurred the distinctions between real and unreal and expanded the field of possibilities while challenging the language of representation. Currently the haptic and optical aspects of materials clearly dominate the discussion, moving away from any prescriptive approach or predetermined outcome, thereby relinquishing any moral judgment about the right way to use them.

The work in this exhibition makes a case that, now more than ever, artifacts are effective ways to instigate real change in this unreal world, and art is tasked with experimenting on the materiality of immateriality.