Sarah Ortmeyer
RIBOCA2 Riga Biennial, Latvia
20 August – 13 September 2020
The 2nd edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art was curated by French curator and writer Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel. For her exhibition, Lamarche-Vadel invited 60 international and regional artists to investigate alternatives to the hopeless narrative of an imminent human-induced apocalypse. Recognising the current critical situation, the biennial looked at re-enchantment as a strategy for building desirable futures, and to reimagine ways of being human within the context of deep ecological, economic and social uncertainty.
Lamarche-Vadel invited Austrian artist Sarah Ortmeyer to participate in the biennial with a new commission that was related to her most recent body of work, the Emoji Shadow Series. Conceived as a sort of universal hieroglyphic language, emojis are perceived by the artist as a way to re-enchant secular vocabulary and exchanges, thus proposing a universal approach to communication without linguistic borders. Conveying a universal emotional language, Sarah Ortmeyer’s work, co-produced in collaboration with Phileas, opened up perspectives to a language contra the norms of worldly communication.
Sarah Ortmeyer (born 1980 in Frankfurt, Germany, lives and works in Vienna) is an artist whose work has been exhibited among other venues at institutions such as Kunstverein München, Munich; Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; MoMA PS1; 21er Haus, Vienna; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Monnaie de Paris.
