2000 Virtual Kingdom of Beauty

“Virtual Kingdom of Beauty” assembles a choice of Joulia Strauss’ favorite Berlin artists, philosophers and friends. 3D-scanned and combined with hairstyles of breathtaking ancient statues, one half became computer-animated and projected onto a holographic screen, the other was semi-automatically transformed into bronzes.


Strauss has lent all of them her digitally manipulated voice in exchange for their statements, in order to let them “oracle” (Sybille Wirsing, FAZ). Why? Is she “looking for a beauty ideal synthesized out of tradition and virtuality?” (Simone Kämpf, Spiegel) Does her “family album” (Thea Herold, Süddeutsche Zeitung)  “approximate an eternal ideal of beauty” (Beate Rüdiger, Radio Kultur). “Is it time to get back to the simple and say goodbye to the avant garde?” (Joseph Engels, Die Welt). “Virtual Kingdom of Beauty” expands, without any effort, from ancient sculptures to the transparent virtuality of the digital age” (Christine Wendenburg, Berliner Morgenpost) and perhaps the “Cleopatra of Microsoft” (Georgy Litichevsky) “looks for the laws of beauty in 3D” (Vera Görgen, Berliner Zeitung). If “beauty is a question of capacity” (Manuel Bonik, 01) then of course “the motive of generating a virtual model of reality lies not in what is, but in what can be” (Christoph Liebherr, Art Exchange Berlin).