TRANS… #cyber-rituals @hyper-self -- Eliška Jahelková, Hannah Neckel, Marlena Jonane

Eliška Jahelková
Hannah Neckel
Marlena Jonane

Curated by Martina Menegon with Brooklyn J. Pakathi

Opening: October 13th, 2022, 6 – 10 pm

The contemporary experience of the digital has inevitably changed our perception and conception of reality, enhancing the concept of performance in relation to the self and the body. Since its early days, the internet has been a space for construction and reconstruction of the self, an environment free from physical limits that allows an unprecedented play with past and new identities. Online, the self becomes de-centred and multiplies without restrictions and in which social media has transformed into a virtual stage, where the diversity of new approaches to performance investigates and reshapes, mainly, the relation between reality and simulation, but also code and body and the very perception of the self through its digital double(s).

The exhibition “TRANS.. #cyber-rituals @hyper-self” transforms the offline gallery space into an experience of simulated identities and rituals of self-representation. It creates a window into the constructing and reconstructive nature of the self and of the internet while establishing rituals, conceptions and unrepressed basis for the performance of the self.

Hannah Neckel, Eliška Jahelková, and Marlena Jonane operate between this space of hyper-simulation and ritualistic digitality. Together, the artists propose, present and play in unique and engaging artistic formats dealing with the process and transformation through the fluidity created by technology. The artworks explore the layering and superimposing of digital, physical, social and technological constructs of the self, while using digital tools to perform, embed, connect and reconstruct identities across realities. Through digitisation and augmentation, avatars, memes, masks and tribals, the exhibition unravels new ritualisation of self-empowering, self-representation and identification in the phygital reality.

In her hybridized formulations, unpacking ideas of internet overload and realities of alienation, Eliška Jahelková switches between painting, music, 3D generated art and regularly maintains a meme repository that stimulates her practice. In the video “LOVELOAD (extended)”, Jahelková’s avatar is trapped in a loop of captions, glitches, and memes. Viewers can’t help but find themselves caught in between a tension of hypnotic sound and a vivid landscape of digital moving images. “user_goes_to_malkut”  and “EYES OF GOD” merge together, recontextualizing painting and meme aesthetics as a new religious ritual. Her work questions the essence and effect of the virtual, of the internet as a feeling and the online world as a mistic everything.

Marlena Jonane’s practice is prone to performance, using the internet as a stage where her creations interface with social media timelines and feeds. Her work ranges from experimental photography, collage-making and sculpture that repurposes material towards a new essence that distorts upon first glance. Jonane’s most recent works are her avatars; masks made of silicon and trash collected in her personal environment that transform through and across realities. Chaining the self while augmenting and altering, she shapes and reconstructs new prosthetic selves that hold glimpses of past interactions.

Hannah Neckel’s multimedia “XXXperiences” seduce viewers into a hyper-space, merging net-first visual cultures with the physical. Her use of symbols, text, 3D renderings and an arsenal of other tools and references propose a utopian internet, where the self is constructed, reconstructed and then open to a further unpacking by viewers of her work. The range of hand-crafted inflatables mediates between various states of reality, abstracting aesthetics as a means to perceive lived experiences both online and away from the keyboard. For “TRANS.. #cyber-rituals @hyper-self”, Neckel also augments form and material by extending into the virtual and altering the public offline space nearby.

TRANS... genre, medium, context, discipline, materiality, aesthetics, identities, gender...
An exhibition series by the institute Transmedia Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna at Georg Kargl Permanent

At the invitation of Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Jakob Lena Knebl and team of the Transmedia Arts department designed an exhibition series with students at Georg Kargl PERMANENT, running from April to December 2022.
The seven-part series is curated by the team of the class Transmediale Kunst, University of Applied Arts Vienna. The exhibitions present works by students that have a kinship to their own artistic practice, as well as expertise of the individual members of the team. The approach is to make the diverse thematic fields and the methodological diversity of Transmedia Arts visible to a broad public.

Transmedia Arts / Jakob Lena Knebl
University of Applied Arts Vienna