Gerald Nestler

Gerald Nestler

Position
  • Visual Artist and Researcher
Gerald Nestler is an artist and writer and sometimes curator who combines theory and text with video, installation, performance and speech to explore what he terms the “derivative condition” of contemporary life in which finance-based models, methodologies, narratives and fictions form a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future.

He is working on an "aesthetics of resolution" as a potential counter-strategy that includes the "figure of the renegade"—a traitor within (black box) systems and an educator beyond their confines that embodies a marginal and ambivalent but at the same time substantial move from dissent to individual forms of insurrection, which open potentials to revolutionize social and technological relations between (in)dividuals, groups and institutions.

Nestler graduated from the Academy of fine arts Vienna (1992). Subsequently, he focused on digital media and Internet art, which led to a growing interest in the economy as a pervasive field of social relations. As a consequence, Nestler pursued artistic fieldwork in financial markets as a broker and trader (1994-97), an experience that has formed his artistic and theoretical practice.

Nestler has shown his work internationally and among other grants and awards received the Austrian State Scholarship for Visual Art (2003) and Austrian AIR grants for Beijing (2008), Krumau (2010), and New York/ISCP (2016). He received a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmith, University of London in 2017.

Contact

Contact Info

Neulinggasse 9/VI
Vienna
,
Austria A-1030
Social Media and Websites

Education

  • PhD, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London

ACTIVITIES | COLLABORATIONS (selection)

THE FUTURE OF DEMONSTRATION. Art and Society in the Post-Digital Era (The Media Art Festival of the City of Vienna). Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Maximilian Thoman. 2017-2018.

Editor, Special Issue on Art and Finance, Finance and Society (with Suhail Malik). 2016.

Editor, MAKING OF FINANCE (with Armen Avanessian, MERVE publishers, Berlin). 2015.

Curator, SOCIAL GLITCH, Kunstraum NOE, WUK and MQ Vienna (with Sylvia Eckermann and Maximilian Thoman). 2015.

SOLO SHOWS | GROUP SHOWS | PROJECTS (selection)

2017

  • VERMÖGEN. THE FUTURE OF DEMONSTRATION. Art in the Post-Digital Era. The Media Art Festival of the City of Vienna. Directors: Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Maximilian Thoman.
  • Technopolitics @ Connecting Spaces, Hong Kong, exhibition and workshops in collaboration with Zurich University of the Arts and Connecting Space, Hong Kong.
  • Tracing Information Society – a Timeline: New Paradigms, Technopolitics @ ever elusive – 30 years of transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and @ nGbK Berlin (exhibition, lectures, workshops).
  • INSTANTERNITY – A BLACK BOX BODY CULT. a performative cartography of automated finance, with Haim Bodek, Sylvia Eckermnn and 3 performer, VORBRENNER 17, Freies Theater Innsbruck.

2016

  • OPERA OF ENTROPY. Post-dramatic music theatre. A coproduction by nomad.theatre and Musiktheatertage Wien, Werk X, Vienna, artistic director: Thomas J. Jelinek.
  • I stood before the source, group show curated by Letters & Handshakes, Blackwood Gallery at University of Toronto Mississauga
  • Tracing Information Society – A Timline. Technopolitics @ MAK. Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna, AT (exhibition, lectures, workshops).
  • THE PROMISE OF AUTOMATION, group show, curated by Anne Faucheret, Kunsthalle Vienna, AT.

2015

  • SOCIAL GLITCH. Radical aesthetics and the consequences of extreme events, curated by Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler und Maximilian Thoman, Kunstraum NOE, Vienna.
  • HEDGE AVANTGARDE. Renegades, Traitors, Educators. An Aesthetic of Resolution, solo show at kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna, 2015.
  • You can’t have a system in which you don’t have anything, public program for artgenève curated by Joanna Warsza, with Armen Avanessian Geneva, CH.
  • ENTROPY. A pataphysical Journey to the End of the World and back... by nomad.theatre, Tanzquartier Vienna, AT.