I KNOW – On the aesthetic of truth: Artists - Art exhibition on Feral File

Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist, and programmer, aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai- and Berlin-based artist Xu Wenkai. Born in 1984 — the title of George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel — and in one of China’s oldest cities, Xi’an, aaajiao’s art and works are marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirit, and sophistication. Many of aaajiao’s works speak to new thinkings, controversies, and phenomena around the internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogosphere, and China’s Great Fire Wall. aaajiao’s recent projects extend his practice to various disciplines (among them, architecture, topography, and design) to capture the pulse of the young generation consuming cyber technology and living in social media.

First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Vladimir Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video, and digital technologies. They define their practice as a “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices, and conflicts of contemporary global culture. AES+F achieved worldwide critical acclaim in 1999 for their “Islamic Project,” which depicted various Western postcard city landscapes manipulated to appear colonized by Islam. AES+F cemented their reputation as a contemporary art powerhouse in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative “Last Riot,” the first of their now signature large-scale, multichannel video installations. Following a large survey exhibition in 2007 at The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, AES+F's next three large video installations titled “The Feast of Trimalchio,” “Allegoria Sacra,” and “Inverso Mundus” debuted at the 53rd Venice Biennale, 4th Moscow Biennale, and 56th Venice Biennale, respectively. The group has had more than 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces, and commercial galleries worldwide.

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’ practice is a continuous reflection on the reuse of materials and data that channel psycho-cognitive perception through examination and transformation from positions of the in-between. It operates against societal algorithms seeking non-compliant patterns of behavior and material, abstracting data to transform and assemble new frontiers, visuals, images, and ideas of the appearance and the polymorphism of selfhood and collectivity. In creating feedback loops and short circuits to redirect the algorithm, the outcome is an amalgamation and consideration of the many forms and textures we can inhabit, and the work to move between them. Performances, painting, sculpture, AI, and mixed reality weave and collage together fragments of whole notions of identity, questions of artistic labor, and challenges to formalism. Extracting oneself from automated algorithmic decision making, they work to create resistance and refusal to the identities constructed by algorithms and social conditioning. Cavalli Bastos has performed and presented work in Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin, Germany), ICA (London, UK), MASP (São Paulo, Brazil) Carnegie Hall (New York, United States), LCCA (Riga, Latvia), CAC Wifredo Lam (Havana, Cuba), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, Austria), MdbK Leipzig (Germany), Transmediale/Haus der Kulture der Welt (Berlin, Germany), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, Germany), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland) and NRW-Forum Dusseldorf (Germany), among other ones.

Claudia Hart emerged as part of the generation of ’90s intermedia “identity” artists. Hart’s first works were feminist critiques of patriarchy and power, taking the form of fake children’s books for adults. In 1995, Penguin published Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli, a series of oil paintings which was republished last year as a new edition. In 1998, the artist expanded to become an early adopter of 3D animation, her intentions now updated by new media. Simulations technologies pushed her practice to explore issues of the body, perception, and nature collapsing into technology and back again.

Yehwan Song is a Korean-born web artist and designer. Yehwan’s work centers on finding the discomfort hidden in the excessively comfortable web environments in order to address systemic inequality. The work reveals the inconvenience that users who do not belong to the main user group experience and criticizes the overgeneralization of user groups and the oversimplification of web interfaces that pursue excessive comfort and consistency only. Yehwan creates anti-friendly websites and satirizes web conventions by undermining the general understanding of web design and subverting common user-experience behaviors. She pursues diversity above consistency and efficiency. Her artworks have been commissioned by the Istanbul Biennale, Seoul Biennale, and the Korean Pavilion of Venice Biennale, among others. Her work has been exhibited at Arko Art Center, Ucca edge, Distant Gallery, Busan Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul Museum Of Arts, and others. She is a current artist-in-residence at La Becque and a community member at New INC - New Museum.