ArchiveExhibition

MARJAN MOGHADDAM

24 Mar-22 Apr 2023
PV 23 Mar 2023, 6-8pm

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY

London E2 9EQ

Overview

Press preview: Thursday 23 March 2023, 5pm
Opening reception: Thursday 23 March 2023, 6–8pm

“Glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics,” suggests the curator and writer Legacy Russell in her 2020 publication, Glitch Feminism. “It helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world.” Put another way, glitch creates productive ruptures in the power dynamics of contemporary digital culture, challenging the superstructures that dictate what technology is, how it should be used, and who it is for. To glitch is an act of resistance; it is a type of world-building, a means of ghosting binaries and creating alternative systems in the process.

Since 2016, the Iran-born digital artist Marjan Moghaddam has developed #Arthacks, a mixed-reality series expanding on the power and poetics of the glitch within the global art economy. Building on the artist’s decades-long practice that integrates world-building and digital embodiment, #Arthacks takes aim at the financial heart of the art world: its fairs. Devised in real time within the three-day framework of each fair, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks are made visible through augmented reality (AR) technologies. The technicoloured anthropomorphic beings disrupt the logics of the art world through their feminist and activist interventions.

Presented in Annka Kultys Gallery’s phygital space, Moghaddam’s most recent series of #Arthacks—For Freedom Part I (2022), For Freedom II (2022), and The American Hush (2022)—are located within real and imagined art fairs. The artist borrows from footage of the fairs shared online as well as conjuring speculative art events with the popular text-to-image AI tool, Midjourney. Within these interventions, Moghaddam’s distorted and hallucinogenic 3D CG figures, which the artist refers to as Chronometric Sculptures, take over sales booths and blackjack tables, even utilising the polished concrete floors between gallery outposts as their own personal runway. Often set to remixes of the Persian protest song Baraye by Shervin Hajipour, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks bring the activist potential of art to the realm of mixed-reality.

From New York to Basel, Miami Beach to London, Moghaddam disrupts the economic and social operations of global art events with her augmented posthuman creations. Taken together, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks speak to the artist’s adept integration of glitch aesthetics, meme culture, and AR technologies to center urgent political movements within the often depoliticised atmosphere of contemporary art fairs.

ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is a hybrid commercial art project that merges physical and digital experiences. Founded by Annka Kultys in 2015/2022, the East London-based gallery has rapidly become a leading art space for artists (particularly millennials), who engage with technology (and more recently decentralised technology) in both traditional and digital media. Through a robust program of exhibitions that showcase these artists alongside a commitment to promoting the hybrid “phygital” approach, Kultys aims to shape the discourse on contemporary art and technology while pushing the boundaries of what is achievable within both physical and digital gallery spaces.

MARJAN MOGHADDAM

24 Mar-22 Apr 2023 PV 23 Mar 2023, 6-8pm

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24 Mar-22 Apr 2023
PV 23 Mar 2023, 6-8pm