Aurélie Bayad (FR/BE)

The addictive force of the internet is real, and who knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being seep into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy and dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?) identities, carefully constructed to live up to new rules and expectations, set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web erotics. Bayad uses her camera, her body and that of others, and her subjective writings to create a new aesthetic language for the new desires of our contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery environments, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects (often herself). She hides her portrayed subjects behind the soft nostalgic hue of the kitschy cultivation of the eighties and nineties, she shoots her films with erratic and ecstatic sequences, gives them heart-pounding soundtracks, and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: 'What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?' With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and disgorging, but colorful encounters with food and other quotidian substances, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse – so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt – Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search towards personal grounding in this confusing networked world.

(Zeynep Kubat)