(c​)​ovid's metamorphoses

With a wide range of work by sound artists and musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers, and visual artists, @ovid's Metamorphoses uses the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching consequences as an instrument for change, artistic and otherwise. A play on experiment across various fields of artistic practice, all featured work revolves around ideas of transmission and inspiration, conjuring up a massive body of vital and daring artistic expressions unashamedly avant-garde.

@ovid's Metamorphoses is a project initiated by Bernd Herzogenrath, professor of American literature and culture at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek. It features contributions from artists from the worlds of film, sound art and music, writing, visual art, and photography, intent on upsetting the idea behind Ovid's Metamorphoses, metamorphosis and progress through violence, and defining the COVID-19 epidemic as a possible counterbalancing act to the myths underlying Western culture. Throughout all the work presented here runs the idea of playfulness as a fundamental artistic act. Infection and transmission allow for an artistic practice that leaves behind the myths that have defined Western culture for centuries.

@ovid's Metamorphoses features an incredible amount of sound pieces, films, texts, photographs, drawings, comics, and paintings produced by a host of artists working in the vanguard of their respective fields. An intertextual play on beauty and meaning makes for art pieces that often get lost in transmission and dwell on an existence beyond the common definitions both aesthetic and moral that run through our culture. All participating artists have exchanged ideas and pieces, fading out myths by way of the game of The Broken Telephone. Through the interplay of infection and information, information chains and sources of infection, new meanings spread, in spaces defined and determined by all artists.

👁️ Please have a look at www.meakusma.org/metamorphosis-ix/
to see the process behind (c)ovid’s metamorphoses explained through 1 example (out of 19 series)

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The (c)ovid's metamorphoses box contains seven CDs, two data DVDs with short films, and a 200 pages full-color book with texts, photographs, drawings, and paintings. Neither the music nor any of the other work comprised in the box is available digitally.