HEY, HOW ARE YOU?

Three-channel video installation. 2025

Grids and Islands. Group Show with Kemil Bektesi, Nikica Jurkovic and curator Data Chigholashvili. Residency Unlimited/Governors Island, NEW YORK, USA.


Exhibition detail. ‘Hey, How are You?’ - Grids and Islands. Governors Island, New York, USA. 2025
 As part of the group exhibition 'Grids and Islands' on Governors Island in New York City, this narrative work explores the boundaries of ontological insecurity (D. Laing) within surveillance-capitalist and authoritarian systems. Systems that have the power to shape, and if necessary, distort human behaviour and coping mechanisms in order to fit societal standards. This practice is already embedded in our offline perceptions of others and of ourselves, and its extension to a society of digitised identities — and often bodies — has become a lived daily experience.


Exhibition detail. ‘Hey, How are You?’ - Grids and Islands. Governors Island, New York, USA. 2025

Narration:

If someone from a minority group experiences a threat, they may grow attached to the feelings of shame and guilt imposed on them from the outside. Visibility and recognisability can then turn into internalised threats. Even when — ideally — the real threat has faded into memory, they may continue to search for enemies and traps. This is because ontological insecurity has been embodied, carried not only in memory but in the very cells of the body.

Online visibility extends the same social rules and logic. Every digital element — whether a strand of hair or a digital social environment — can replicate deeply coded and biased worldviews. Furthermore, the black-box nature of digital spaces leaves individuals exposed to the same old problems of the real world.
The aesthetics of

the videos reflect on the political question of visibility in the case of ontologically insecure peoples. By distancing from the 'personal', they depict a generic digital body of a standard and safely impersonal perspective, returning control and power to the individual over their own ‘body’ by rendering their avatar unidentifiable.

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