DISCONNECTING INTERGOD

 

Do we actually realize that the Internet – the idea and the dream of the Web – has stopped to be what it used to? While browsing, posting, liking, sharing and chatting every day, we hardly recollect the state-of-the-art beginning, the technological and aesthetical development of the Internet; the emptiness of digital space, the revolutionary ideas of democracy, access and participation, the hackers’ dreams of freedom and changing the world, or the cyborg bodies associated with the dawn of the Internet.

The exhibition of Voin de Voin raises these issues, which are today part of the ideas of postinternet art. It includes paintings, photographs, visual and sound installations, implemented from numerous different materials. The artist shows in a new and different light the ways in which all people use the Web. His works bring to visibility the emptiness of virtual space and show how flimsy, artificial, flexible and shifting it is. Painting is an image that the viewers can scan with their phones; photographs show contemporary Adam and Eve as appliqué figures compiled using simple Photoshop commands; part of the installations and images are generated through data and codes. From the cup-of-coffee icon back to the idea of ​​the Digital God, the works are presented as “icons” in an everyday temple in which each title, image and sound have multiple meanings. They tell simultaneously about human and divine creation, the ability of God, as well as of man, to create worlds.

The exhibition itself is a large installation made up of different components in which, at first glance, everything seems interconnected. Yet, the highlight is elsewhere. In the very title the author calls the attention to our possibilities to disconnect from the Web and return to ourselves and to our own bodies.

Voin de Voin (born 1978) lives and works in Sofia and in Brussels. He works in various fields of visual art, ranging from performance to painting, and combines in his works a variety of materials, approaches and media. Together with Snejanka Mihaylova he founded the Institute for performance and theory in 2014.

The Meeting Point Platform for young artists and contemporary art and the Sculpture programme of Vaska Emanouilova Gallery are supported by Societe Generale EXPRESSBANK  WE SUCCEED TOGETHER.

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