.gif – En online udstilling

Welcome to .gif ­– an online exhibition presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art. We have invited eleven artists to create new works of art in the form of GIF files. The invitation was open-ended: create one or more works of art in a GIF format.

Se all GIFs at giphy.com or click the artists name on the right.

Ragnhild Maj, alwaysgoodart.gif, 2018, GIF-fil

THE ARTISTS
Each participating artist contributed between one and ten GIFs. The artists are: Pernille Abd-El Dayem, Sufie Elmgreen, Holger Hartvig, Torben Ribe, Peter Voss-Knude, Joachim Koester, Maja Malou Lyse, Ragnhild May, Rasmus Myrup, Anna Margrethe Pedersen and Mads Lindberg.

GIFs are everywhere
GIFs have become an integral part of everyday communication for many. They can be inserted in text messages, chats and status updates, offering easy shortcuts for conveying emotion. Joy, rage or displeasure can be illustrated by a GIF featuring a funny facial expression, an animation sequence or an actor making a distinctive gesture.

gif EXHIBITION
With the exhibition .gif, the Museum of Contemporary Art takes a closer look at the GIF as one of the key image formats of contemporary life and a major part of the visual world that surrounds us. The imagery of GIFs is already governed by a range of codes and conventions – and like any other media technology, the GIF can potentially be used as an artistic medium.  

Maja Malou Lyse, Smartass, 2018, GIF-fil

What is a gif?
The GIF format [Graphic Interchange Format] was invented thirty years ago as a flexible image format for websites and the like. Today, a GIF usually consists of a series of images shown in such rapid succession that our eyes perceive them as a (usually very brief) film clip. Once all the pictures have been shown, the sequence starts over, causing the GIF to loop without ever pausing.  

In recent years, social media has seen GIFs take on new functions: easy to use and share, GIFs have become a visual language or set of signs that can be incorporated in practically all digital communication. GIFs are used in memes and online communication rather like emojis. Such new usage has also imbued the GIF with new cultural meaning.

the exhibition does not take place at the museum in Roskilde
The exhibition is exclusively an online phenomenon: it takes place at samtidskunst.dk/gif, on the large GIF website Giphy.com and on Facebook. Because GIFs can so easily be used in text messages, emails, Facebook updates and all sorts of other online communication, the works can be widely disseminated, go viral and enter into new contexts indefinitely. This exhibition might just as well be presented in a text message as on the museum website. 

LEss LOL, more WTF!
Not all of the artists featured here have worked with GIFs before – far from it – but they all connect their GIF pieces to their other practices and to the issues and themes they address in other media.

While some of the artists created GIFs on their phone or by means of the online tools available on Giphy.com, Anne Margrethe Pedersen approached the task the ‘old-fashioned’ way: every frame of her GIF animations is hand-drawn. Joachim Koester took excerpts from his own works as the basis for GIF loops, translating them into a new format. Pernille Abd-El Dayem is a writer, and her GIFs make references to her recent novel, June. Holger Hartvig works mainly in the field where music and performance art intersect, and his GIF contribution points toward his current major undertaking.

Peter Voss-Knude, Uden titel, 2018, GIF-fil #kronjuveler

REPETITION
Several of the artists work with the uncanny effedt caused by the ceaseless repetition of the GIF, evoking a sense of something ghostly or machine-like:

‘If you look at a GIF in itself, the loop is a little world of its own that slowly empties itself out. Once you have seen everything there is to see in the loop world, there comes a time when it somehow gets old. But the GIFs does not stop. The flesh does not rot. […] A cat falling in a funny way stops being funny after many repeated loops. It feels cruel, nightmarish, that it should keep falling long after we’ve stopped laughing at it’, says artist Pernille Abd-El Dayem.

HOW TO VIEW AND USE THE GIFS
The Museum of Contemporary Art sends these GIFs out into the world in several different ways. You can find the exhibition at samtidskunst.dk/gif, at giphy.com, and on the museum’s Facebook page.

We hope you’ll want to use these GIFs – feel free to share them straight from Giphy, or download them and insert them in your emails, messenger feeds etc. That way, these art GIFs will become part of the total vocabulary of GIFs on a par with all the others.