Guest Room:
Claus Gunti & Visvaldas Morkevičius

Guest Room is a format that fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. This moth, art historian, curator, and professor at ECAL Claus Gunti and visual artist Visvaldas Morkevičius propose the theme "Seeing with Emotions".

"Looking at images on social media – scrolling through ASMR accounts, images of warfare, food porn, and TikTok trends – often triggers overlapping, frequently paradoxical emotional responses, and a generally dark mood. Joy, expectation, satisfaction, disgust, indignation: all are channeled within our scrolling habits and monetized. Filter bubbles and algorithms artificially reinforce communities and beliefs that grow increasingly dissociated from "reality." Images are less and less credible, as AI slop and templated content flood our feeds. Making sense of the world, in this context of engineered attention economies and the proliferation of formatted social media content, has become increasingly complex.

This Guest Room is an exploration of this context through the works of artists focused on the one thing we can claim to be real in our lives: our emotions. In the wake of the affective turn, artists have recently focused increasingly on our emotional states, addressing care, coping mechanisms, intimacy, relationships with others, or reflective practices, which deal with these attempts to make sense of the world through what we feel."