01
Exp → 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 lived daily experiences.
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 develop an attachment to the feelings of shame and guilt imposed from outside. Visibility and recognisability then become internalised threats. Even when - ideally- the real threat becomes only a memory, they might continue to seek out enemies and traps, as the ontological insecurity became embodied - and stored in the body's very cells.
Online visibility extends the same social rules and logic. All digital elements, 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 problems of the same old real-world.
Exhibition detail. ‘Hey, How are You?’ - Grids and Islands. Governors Island, New York, USA. 2025
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 perspectives, returning control and power to the individual over their own ‘body’ by rendering their digital replica unrecognisable.