Neïl Beloufa. Pandemic Pandemonium

29.06.2022 - 04.09.2022

Vereinigung Bildender KünstlerInnen, Wiener Secession, Wien / Österreich

In the work of the award-winning French-Algerian video and installation artist Neïl Beloufa, power is a central and recurring theme. His works deal on one hand with common practices of data collection and digital surveillance, nationalist ideologies, postcolonial understandings of the world, social conflicts between majority and minority societies, hegemony, and oppression, and on the other hand, with the power of images in regards to our perception of reality. In videos, feature films, sculptures, and technologically complex installations, he confronts contemporary society, which is simultaneously represented and mediated through digital interaction, attempting to thereby uncover mechanisms of control....

Here, fiction and reality can become enmeshed, making it at times impossible to differentiate between the real and unreal. Formally, his work borrows from the vocabulary of the information age – the internet, video games, reality television, CCTV cameras, and political propaganda. In immersive installations, he assembles existing information and, like an editor, brings the multi-layered material into (ever) new arrangements. By renouncing all moral evaluation, he makes it possible to experience perception and reality, which today are all-too influenced by stereotypes. Beloufa’s work thus represents an artistic reflection of the present and shows current designs for life in the digital age.

His exhibition at the Secession is his first institutional solo exhibition in Austria.

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Bettina Spörr

[Quelle: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.secession.at/en/exhibition/neil-beloufa/]