Uncanny Virtuality focuses on digital art, photography, the moving image, realism, and hyperreality. Each artist explores themes of reality and virtuality through their perspective practices, commenting on a disconnection, anxiety and irony that is unique to our current generation within a new-media world. Through a digital expression, they find satire in the stresses of the 21st century, attending to modes of existential crisis, climate disaster, ecology, human nature and capitalistic corruption. Their works lead us to ponder how the realm of hyperreality can lead to abstracted, disconnected experience.
As a jumping off point, “the digital” is referenced in Uncanny Virtuality as a way of thinking and operating, as opposed to a strict medium or mode of creation. The artists work within 3D media, animation, video, photography and digitally informed sculptural and painterly practice, pointing to the blurring lines between reality and simulated existence. Using the moving image and the digital as a starting point to critically comment on a social state of affairs, the artists of Uncanny Virtuality reference digitally experienced worlds as a way to critique the global state of abstraction, destruction, and corruption we have found ourselves in. They acknowledge the modes of dissociation and anxiety of existence that come from simulated realities and within the digital, questioning thus what the future holds within a society that has become so dependent upon online realities and digital expressions of sociality.
The participating artists are Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir, Meriem Bennani, María Guðjohnsen, Bita Razavi, Helena Margrét Jónsdóttir and Inari Sandell.
Curated by Daría Sól Andrews.