The virtual world once promised to expand how we imagine and connect. Shaped by our desires, avatars allowed us to re-create ourselves. By now, the virtual has become a place of invisible labour and consumption. Avatars can be used for control and exploitation. Our environments seem filled with digital and machinic proxies—figures presented as monsters, hollow vessels, sexualized props, or optimized assistants.
The artists in this programme explore the tension between artificial figures as uncanny doubles, and reality as entanglement of worlds and influences. Their works reimagine the virtual as a space for ritual, creativity, and change. In these spaces, the border between the real and digital blurs. Where does the human spirit end, and the digital interface begin? Are we tools, or are we twins?
This programme has been co-curated with curator and writer Astrid Korporaal.
Introductions
Charmaine Poh, GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY 2023, video, colour, sound, 6 min
Femke Herregraven, Prelude to: When the Dust Unsettles 2022, video, colour, sound, 15 min
Ana María Millán, Elevation 2019, video, colour, sound, 10 min
Josefa Ntjam, Melas de Saturne 2020, video, colour, sound, 11 min
Priyageetha Dia, Spectre System 2024, video, colour, sound, 15 min
Stephanie Comilang, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise), video, colour, sound, 25 min
Conversation between Astrid Korporaal, Stephanie Comilang, Ana María Millán and Charmaine Poh
The programme opens with a short video by Charmaine Poh. Made from found footage, it displays the artist as a preteen TV actor in the early 2000s in Singapore. Through the use of a deep-fake, it presents her avatar, E-Ching, an eternal 12-year-old version of the artist. Good Morning Young Body (2021-2023) combines a nostalgic aesthetic of early digital culture with reflections on darker subjects.
E-Ching gives voice to the problems of abstracting young, female bodies into sites of collective desire, and the real work of mediating this desire. The video addresses the politics of the gaze and questions of agency that return throughout the works in this programme. By reclaiming the figure of the avatar in different ways, they redefine the values of freedom and anonymity, labour and reflection.
The second work screened is Femke Herregraven’s Prelude to: When The Dust Unsettles (2022). This work introduces us to a different kind of digital twin, which is used in contemporary mining projects. Hijacking the visuals used to plan investments and extraction strategies, the film guides us in a meditation on identity and interdependence. The main characters are a territority in Manono, Congo, and its twin in virtual space, who are locked in a conversation that reveals more and more gaps and absences between them.
In Joséfa Ntjam’s Mélas de Saturne (2020), another colonial ecology is conjured. The video explores the generative force of blackness through a landscape that entangles melancholia, oceanic abysses and the darknet. It features a fictional character called ‘Persona’, who searches for cosmic connections and algorithmic origins among the Meta population living in North-East Cameroon. The film combines the frames of code with an aesthetic of fluidity, referencing our everyday and mythological masks.
The next work screened also presents a parallel world with roots in cosmological and political practices. Ana María Millán’s Elevación (2019) is based on the Colombian comic ‘Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia’, which tells the story of the first independent farmers’ republic in Colombia. The narrative of armed conflict is translated through roleplay avatars with powers to shape a landscape that combines traumatic memories with healing imagination. The lack of linear plot or transparent resolution allows for mythic associations to appear.
Priyageetha Dia’s Spectre System (2024) introduces a computer-generated avatar as a ghost. The video work abandons the idea of the ideal virtual worker who creates ‘free’ time. Instead, it connects the digital body to the rhythm of the breath, cyclical changes in the atmosphere, and the weight of memory. The film refuses the erasure of the history of indentured labour, binding images of distorted bodies and landscapes to traces of plantation labour on the Malay Peninsula.
Labour dynamics return in Stephanie Comilang’s 2016 science fiction documentary Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise). The narrator is an invisible avatar, the drone-spirit Paraiso, who gathers and transmits the messages of Filipina migrant workers in Hong Kong. Paraiso watches over the women as they create their own spaces of care outside the domestic confines of their labour, and helps transmit photo, video and text messages to their loved ones at home.
Astrid Korporaal
A curator, researcher and writer, Astrid Korporaal is completing her PhD at Kingston University. Her research focuses on experimental, collaborative practices in contemporary moving image production. Previously, she worked as Curator of Education Partnerships at the ICA.
Charmaine Poh
Charmaine Poh is an artist who works across photography, film, media, and performance to navigate questions of the gendered body, queer world making, performed labor of the everyday, and the intersection of offline and online worlds. Evolving her art practice with the everchanging landscape of digital technologies, Poh’s work expands the potentialities of the body to imagine new perspectives of gender and social equality even for the near techno-future.
Femke Herregraven
Femke Herregraven’s work examines the impact of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life. Her research into the interplay between financial markets, risk, and the physical world forms the basis of her sculptures, drawings, films, and hybrid installations. A recurring theme in her work is the financialization of the future as a crisis, which she explores through catastrophe bonds as speculative instruments for redistributing risk and disaster.
Josèfa Ntjam
Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions and philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction.
Ana María Millán
Ana María Millán works with the narrative spaces of video, with a specific interest in subcultures and resisting exclusory discourses. Local stories are combined with collaborative rehearsals. Creating her work in close collaboration with video gamers and Live Action Role Play (LARP) communities, Millán approaches animation as a tool to invent and (re-)claim a meaningful space in this world.
Priyageetha Dia
Priyageetha Dia works with time-based media and installation. Her practice is braided between the speculation of the tropics and the ancestral intelligence within the machine. Using computed-generated imagery, performance and archival materials, Dia conjures speculative narratives that urge for deeper contemplation and rethinking around labour, colonial histories and identity.
Stephanie Comilang
Stephanie Comilang juxtaposes temporality, geography, and technology into narratives in which the future and past become aligned, addressing diasporas, generations, survival, violence, and desire. Comilang’s films are a combination of chronicle and illusion, with stories that inhabit multiple voices and perspectives. Her documentary approach stresses themes of social mobility, global labor, and cross-cultural communication.
This event will be BSL interpreted.
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