Dr Edgar Schmitz

Schmitz’ soundtrack series To Go with the Comet for the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show 7: Days of the Comet scored the suspense of movie idents across the itinerant exhibition’s eleven venues.
Surplus Cameo Decor installed episodic decors at Cooper Gallery Dundee and Himalayas Art Museum Shanghai for cameo appearances by art and film world protagonists. Hubs and Fictions convened conversations about current art and its imports of remoteness across meetings, panels and a book published by Sternberg.
As Shadowartist for Netwerk Aalst, Schmitz inscribed himself into the organisation’s infrastructure and modus operandi by editing texts and contracts, loaning terminology, and interfering with the physicality of the gallery environment and distribution of online content.
Schmitz co-founded the Animate Assembly research cluster with Esther Leslie, Verina Gfader and Anke Hennig to intersect animation, animism, anime and animacy, and to explore how animate/ inanimate divides are currently undergoing substantial re-arrangement.
He initiated CHOREOGRAPHIC as a way of collaborating with invited guests from the fields of choreography and (post-)dance on one-off productions at the intersection of artistic, curatorial and discursive labour formats. The annual Choreographic Devices series co-produced with Murat Adash, Ofri Cnaani and Sara Sassanelli expands on this work in the form of a speculative exhibition format at ICA London and CAC Vilnius. CHOREOGRAPHIC is concerned with the materialities of composite productions, with the (dis-)articulation of movement, and with the dispersal of animacy.
Schmitz co-leads The Ignorant Art Schools with Sophia Yadong Hao, Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart, a British Art Network research group investigating European alternative art pedagogy in relation to recent forms of collective curatorial agency in Global Majority countries.
And he is currently involved in establishing a Necromancing research cluster with Konstfack Stockholm.