Of Bodies in Dig­i­tal Life

The exhi­bi­tion fea­tures young Swiss artists whose work engages with the body in dig­i­tal life. Since the dawn of the inter­net era, the topic has con­tin­ued to be a sub­ject of dis­cus­sion as well as of artis­tic explo­ration: Utopian visions of tran­scend­ing the body and becom­ing cyborg con­front the sober real­ity of swip­ing over smooth, cold sur­faces for hours on end, caus­ing aching joints and dis­rupted sleep. While today vir­tual spaces and online plat­forms offer diverse oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-empow­er­ment as well as net­work­ing and com­mu­nity-build­ing, the realms beyond these niches con­tinue to be dom­i­nated by nor­ma­tively beau­ti­ful and gender-stereo­typ­i­cal body images. A gen­er­a­tion of artists born in the 1990s, the decade that wit­nessed the launch of the World Wide Web, fuse the every­day expe­ri­ence and crit­i­cal reflec­tion of media-sat­u­rated life with the tra­di­tion of the artis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of bodies.