Digitalia

About

Digitalia is a guest-curated exhibition of multi-media work, deliberating on the use of social media as both an accessible art form and cultural landscape. The exhibition is curated by Noor Bhangu and features work by Rah Eleh (Canada), František Fekete (Czech Republic), Mahmoud Khaled (Egypt), Ayqa Khan (United States), and Joshua Vettivelu (Canada).

This exhibition takes as a possible starting point the concept of “digitalia,” coined by the Canadian film critic, Cameron Bailey, to speak on the convergence of genitalia, marginalia, and wires. Bailey used the concept to interrogate ways in which bodies perform their gender, race, sexuality, and disability through the virtual sphere. “Digitalia,” as a theoretical concept and organizing principle, works to dislodge popular, and accepted, notions of the Internet as a neutral or neutralizing space whose disembodied system is not programmed to recognize embodied difference.

The exhibition will feature multi-media and multi-perspectival work offering various entry points into the question: if the virtual is always allied with disembodiment, what are the options for bodies that think and perform otherwise? By way of inquiry, Digitalia will employ social media sites, primarily generated by user content – Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, and porn archives – as portals to witness the ways in which embodied subjects embroil themselves into the virtual fabric through their enrolment as active participants.