The latest exhibition by Misk Art Institute, The Silent Age of Singularity sets out to explore what it means to forge art in the firepit of technology and retain a sense of provenance.
Nobody quite agrees what post-internet art was, only that it’s already over. Coined in 2006 by artist and curator Marisa Olson, the term describes a short-lived yet influential grouping that peaked in the early 2010s and was effectively killed by the disastrous DIS-curated 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016. Unlike progenitors such as the net art of the 1990s, post-internet artists took the internet not as their medium but rather as their toolkit. As such, their work closed the gap between the blinding whiteness of the blank screen and white cube, between the digital image and the physical painting, sculpture or installation; the image object. To paraphrase critic Brian Droitcour, this was art made to be photographed and look good in a browser: not as net art, but as documentation.
Emerging with the advent of platform capitalism and the widespread adoption of social media – Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006 – post-internet art captured what it meant to be a datapoint in the attention economy. As in, how it produces us as images, how we are interpellated by it, and what it feels like to be extremely online. It wasn’t art after the internet so much as art after the algorithm.
On the face of it, the works in The Silent Age of Singularity, presented by Misk Art Institute in Riyadh’s Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall, have very little to do with the singularity of its title. Curated by Basma Alshathry with Aram Al-Ajaji, its framing gestures vaguely to the advent of the internet and its integration in our everyday lives, and to how artists are responding to the rapid pace of technological change. The curators posit a new horizon dubbed the “Creative Singularity”, in which digital technologies offer new tools for artistic creation and artists in turn won’t compete with machines so much as “influence and transform technology to further enrich creative expression in this digital age”. Putting this word salad aside, far more interesting is to consider the show in the spirit of post-internet art, albeit one with a vocabulary that is very far from that movement’s NY-BER axis and, given the pervasive state-sponsored techtopianism here, with none of its trolling effect.
Image courtesy of the artist
Installed in a long, gauntlet-like black box on one side of the ground floor, Ayman Yossri Daydban’s Beautiful Image (2021) feels like speed running the information highway. Frenetically flashing screens – thankfully preceded by a too-rare photosensitive epilepsy warning – beam fragments from films and documentary footage that have shaped both the artist’s life and the wider Arab region, for an unsettlingly immersive experience that feels like nothing so much as @horse ebooks’s pithy, era-defining tweet “everything happens so much”. On the floor above, the looping gifs of Turki Alqahtani’s Kilobytes (2024) pay homage to the maximalist visual language of Arab digital culture from the 2000s, all roses, pastel illustrations and aggressively spinning sparkly text: WhatsApp forwards from the pre-WhatsApp era.
Nearby, Eiman Elgibreen’s Electronic Veils (2018) series unravels the dissonance between electronic communication and an IRL encounter. Emails with British artists and other cultural workers are printed onto plexiglass boxes that have an obscured silhouette of the artist on wooden panels inside. Like the person on the other side of the screen, they are hard to read. Especially interesting here are the individual work titles, taken from something each correspondent said upon first meeting: So She Is Open-Minded, And You Are..? or I Thought You Were A Big Irish Guy! It suggests the jeune filleenergy of artists like Petra Cortwright, Molly Soda and Amalia Ulman to present what it means to be – to perform being – a Saudi Woman Artist, online.
There are historical references aplenty too, including suites of Samia Halaby’s glitchy digital paintings from the 1980s and Nam Jun Paik’s prepared television sculptures, the latter installed in a section clad in floor-to-ceiling dead channel IKB. Elsewhere, Ibrahim Abumsmar’s installation No Signal (2006/2015) presents us with the contemporary analogue of Google Chrome’s offline T-Rex side scroller, otherwise known as the No Internet Game. And on each of the hall’s central staircases, Ahmed Mater’s Green Antenna (2010) and Khaled Makhshoush’s lo-fi cyberpunk animations of Riyadh cityscapes Cranes and Early Evening (2024) both capture the acutely lonely nostalgia and yearning of logging on, across different technologies and generations.
Perhaps the most lasting contribution of post internet art was the way in which it took seriously the nature of the digital image itself, via either critical theory or painting. Amid the same-same-but-different-technology generative photography and digital painting, including iPhone illustrations from David Hockney, there are a number of interesting considerations in this vein. Mohammed Chrouro’s RGB digital gradient colour fields, for example, or Soufiane Idrissi’s canvases which extend the logic of Google Image Search lazy loading to recast abstraction as radical data compression. Especially compelling is Ziad Kaki’s monochromatic painting Surveillance (2019), which pairs the language of night vision with a style that is both flattened and curiously textured in places. The effect is akin to an interrupted skeuomorph.
As for theory? In this region, we’re largely lacking and it shows in this rewarding survey that is let down only by its slapdash framing. After all, there’s something faintly ridiculous about reading a show in Riyadh via post-internet art. The internet may be global, but the work it engenders is specific, local and grounded in the history and culture of the societies in which it is made. The scholarship around it should be, too.
The Silent Age of Singularity runs until 27 February
