aaajiao | I was dead on the Internet
aaajiao | I was dead on the Internet | May 1-July 16, 2022
We are delighted to share with you Mirna Funk’s interview with aaajiao (Welt, July 03), and a review of the exhibition by Frances Arnold (ArtAsiaPacific, July 12).
I was dead on the Internet, where I once thought I was raised. The past two years of trapping in Berlin, inhabiting on the huge penthouse balcony—the Benthamian panopticon—observing the daily routine of all the neighbours while surviving on the Internet, I still died. Under the strong winter wind, the fluttering rustle of bamboo leaves erased the greasy fingerprints left by the fingers rubbing the screen; body sunken into the sofa, with its black leather surface that smelled of hair, dust wrapped in fungus falling on the arms, on the deathbed, transforming into a red maple. The branches of the red maple dried out during the winter. Remnants left by the mushrooms were drifted away with the wind, landing next to another body and being carried away by ants. Failure, frustration, worthless moments and thoughts die on the Internet.
aaajiao
From the gallery’s external windows covered with digital images taken by aaajiao in Berlin during the Covid-19 pandemic, to small LCD screens changing rapidly their basic functions or colors, ‘I was dead on the Internet’ is a personal contemplation on the grievability of life on the Internet, and the meaning of (virtual) death.
The exhibition is a direct outcome of the deletion of aaajiao’s Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter) account in 2020. As an artist, activist and blogger the elimination of his (virtual) identity as he was also forced by the pandemic into a state of nomadism, is explored in the exhibition through themes of human and non-human vulnerability, nature and life after death in the age of surveillance.
The exhibition is being realized in the context of NEUSTART KULTUR with the support of Deutsche Künstlerbund, and the Minister of State for Culture and the Media (BKM).
Installation views: Andrea Rossetti.