Carola Bonfili’s VR Work Featured in Spatial Affairs

Italian artist Carola Bonfili’s 2018 VR work 3412 Kafka - First Chapter, supported by VIVE Arts, is exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary. The Museum, with a focus on contemporary art, hosts the group exhibition Spatial Affairs from April 29 to June 27, 2021. It is curated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás with an international list of more than 40 artists and collectives.

This multi-sensorial exhibition challenges our perception of realities and simulations, the material and the immaterial, and attempts to question the increasingly porous boundaries of physical and digital space. Bonfili’s work takes us to an uncanny oneiric space where she recreates scenes at the crossroad of thoughts and memories. Named after an asteroid discovered in 1983, the artist takes the viewer on a stellar journey into an elusive future where time and recollections are no longer fixed. Her work can be experienced in the museum with VR headsets alongside an installation including models, prints and a video installation, truly exhilarating the senses. This multimedia Kafkaesque series of artworks by Bonfili developed over a number of years integrating many topics from the artist’s imagination and is collected at renowned museums such as the MAXXI in Rome.

“Virtual reality gives us the possibility to work with materials and environments in a large scale that otherwise would have been difficult to access in the real world,” the artist says. For Carola Bonfili, VR technology allows her to contain monumental space and probe the passing of time.