NeMe

Curators: Helene Black and Aysu Arsoy

NeMe presented its first project in 2006, the year the Wikileaks site was launched, and from the start, its approach has been situation-based rather than site-specific. The project In Transition Cyprus (2006), focusing on displacement, caused by the effects of political, economic, environmental, or social injustices, established the organization’s critical voice and its interdisciplinary path. In 2013, a few months after the NSA documents leak by Edward Snowden, NeMe concentrated on creating projects that reveal the invasive aspects of our ubiquitous technologies that weaponize and corrupt our media and communication cultures, manipulate, and commodify our communities, and destroy our environment.

NeMe’s critical but inclusive approach draws from a wide spectrum in order to facilitate a representative dialogue without restrictions by political ideologies. The organization works with emerging and established philosophers, theorists, and artists to create a discourse that defies hegemonic views or cultural institutional trends, and encourages radical questions about the collateral effects of global politics and policies. For example, the nEUROsis project (2016), which investigated the growing instability of the European Union (EU), predicted and discussed some of the issues surrounding BREXIT. As such, NeMe is always shifting, researching, and proactively posing insightful questions concerning the constantly transforming geo-sociopolitical power structures. This approach does not only present silenced, suppressed, or excluded voices, but, in effect, attempts to formulate possible futures away from the forcefield of commodified political decisions, and fosters an understanding of the directions our prevalent exploitative economic system is implementing. By developing projects that confront critical interconnected challenges, such as the climate change, refugee crisis, systemic collapse, social injustices, technologically enabled manipulation, labor, etc, NeMe is investigating the role of art as a transformative medium for reimagining our future though the operational practices of artists and theorists. Documentation of NeMe’s projects and platforms can be found on http://www.neme.org