Sara Culmann primarily works with temporal (or screen) media, combining in her works found footage videos, CGI-animation, simulations and computer games. She also works with graphics and objects, creates films using a game engine (software for developing video and computer games) and 3D graphics. The artist is interested in a new understanding of the world of materials and things, a connection of the physical world with the digital one, the sensuality of the object world and the transformation of socio-cultural stereotypes under the influence of economics and speculative concepts of progress and technology.
For the Cosmoscow foundation’s program "Series", the artist created a graphic story "... a few words about fall", trying to consider the catastrophe as an act of creation through the poetics of cosmogonic myths, a kind of Song of Songs, where explicit and implicit theories of the origin of life are mixed. In the voice of the Stone, flying to Earth, you one can hear hints of the concept of the RNA world, the hypothesis of panspermia and assumptions about viruses brought from the space. The nature of an impactful event that excites the planet is considered by the artist as a violently erotic story as contradictory as disputes about the meaning and origin of life. The attempt to describe the ambivalence of any natural event, sometimes fatally indifferent to its consequences and participants, is transmitted through a pseudo-religious aesthetics that hints at another concept of world creation, namely creationism. Thus, for a man today such an eclectic description of the essence of the catastrophe looks like an ironic reflection and a call for a reasonable attitude to all kinds of theories and planetary panics.
The full version of "... a few words about fall" you can find on Instagram.
Sara Culmann was born in Kirovsk. She works and lives in Moscow and Amsterdam. Since 2019 she is a resident of the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam. A winner of the Garage Digital grant program of the Garage Museum. A participant of the following exhibitions and projects: "Extemporary: art out of time" (Arsenal, Nizhny Novgorod and PERMM, Perm) 2019-2020, "Semantic noise" (De School, Amsterdam) 2019, "Pleasure Machine" (Sidur Museum, Moscow) 2019, IAM (Garage Museum, Moscow) 2018, "Birth of Asset" (ASI.MOSCOW, Moscow) 2018, "Hosting the Inhuman" (V-A-C foundation, MMOMA, Moscow) 2017, "Expanding space" (GES-2, V-A-C Foundation, Moscow) 2015, "Pink Flamingo" (Bleek, St. Niklas) 2017 and others.