“SPARK: Welcome to the Misanthropocene” with Mel E. Logan, A.L. Steiner & TUM students

“Spark” is an aural-sculptural intervention that will occur in the foyer of Museum Brandhorst, premiering in collaboration with “Chicks on Speed” founder Mel E. Logan and Logan’s long-time collaborator A.L. Steiner. Interweaving a cacophony of urgency—an original score for an unknown future—the site-specific project will be constructed with hands-on, easily accessible objects in the traditions of kinetic and sound art. The core of the work will be constructed from the multiple eco-sociological crises this generation is shouldering. From queer ecosexuality to the extractivist practices of capitalism to kinship, land use, overuse and reuse, the intervention will transform the museum space temporarily and temporally—to incorporate the artists, participants and public in the cycle of artistic production and environmental impact which are continually inhabited.

“Spark” takes place as part of a collaboration with FILMFEST MÜNCHEN and Technical University of Munich, which awarded A.L. Steiner the TUM Global Visiting Professorship 2023. The temporary intervention at Museum Brandhorst is the culmination of a two-day workshop by Steiner and Logan as part of the seminar initiated by Dr. Sarah Hegenbart, “Welcome to the Misanthropocene: Ecological catastrophes and ecofeminist art activism.”

A.L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Steiner is co-curator of “Ridykeulous,” co-founder of “Working Artists and the Greater Economy” (“W.A.G.E.”) and collaborates with numerous writers, performers, designers, activists and artists. She is Faculty at Yale University’s School of Art. Steiner is based in New York and is featured in permanent collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, to name but a few.

Mel E. Logan stepped into electronic music producing and writing while studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Logan's practice of painting, music and performance comes together as audio sculptures with which the visitors perform the music, working with a hybrid format floating between a sound player and instrument building. Electromagnetism and the motions of the human body or of data are subjects Logan's work deals with in a direct, partially analogue format where machines are extensions of humanity’s superpowers. As a founder of “Chicks on Speed,” Logan has exhibited and performed at Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, Beirut Art Center, Moog Lab Trinity College Dublin, Museum Tinguely Basel, Art Science Museum Singapore, MoMA PS1, the Royal Festival Hall London and the ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Mel E. Logan's artworks are in the (selected) collections of Agustin Sanchez Vidal, Madrid, Dr. Stephanie Bohn, Bonn, Museum of Communication, Frankfurt, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Dr. Sarah Hegenbart is Lecturer in Art History at TUM. Prior to this, she worked as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she also undertook her doctoral research, and as Curator of Art at the Pembroke Art Gallery at the University of Oxford. She is a member of “Die Junge Akademie Mainz” and the consortium of the Horizon 2020 research project “Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies.” Sarah is author of “From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso: Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa as Postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk?” and co-editor (together with Mara Kölmel) of “Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics.”