Marjan Moghaddam

About

“Glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics,” suggests the curator and writer Legacy Russell in her 2020 publication, Glitch Feminism. “It helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world.” Put another way, glitch creates productive ruptures in the power dynamics of contemporary digital culture, challenging the superstructures that dictate what technology is, how it should be used, and who it is for. To glitch is an act of resistance; it is a type of world-building, a means of ghosting binaries and creating alternative systems in the process.

Since 2016, the Iran-born digital artist Marjan Moghaddam has developed #Arthacks, a mixed-reality series expanding on the power and poetics of the glitch within the global art economy. Building on the artist’s decades-long practice that integrates world-building and digital embodiment, #Arthacks takes aim at the financial heart of the art world: its fairs. Devised in real time within the three-day framework of each fair, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks are made visible through augmented reality (AR) technologies. The technicoloured anthropomorphic beings disrupt the logics of the art world through their feminist and activist interventions.

Presented in Annka Kultys Gallery’s phygital space, Moghaddam’s most recent series of #Arthacks—For Freedom Part I (2022), For Freedom II (2022), and The American Hush (2022)—are located within real and imagined art fairs. The artist borrows from footage of the fairs shared online as well as conjuring speculative art events with the popular text-to-image AI tool, Midjourney. Within these interventions, Moghaddam’s distorted and hallucinogenic 3D CG figures, which the artist refers to as Chronometric Sculptures, take over sales booths and blackjack tables, even utilising the polished concrete floors between gallery outposts as their own personal runway. Often set to remixes of the Persian protest song Baraye by Shervin Hajipour, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks bring the activist potential of art to the realm of mixed-reality.

From New York to Basel, Miami Beach to London, Moghaddam disrupts the economic and social operations of global art events with her augmented posthuman creations. Taken together, Moghaddam’s #Arthacks speak to the artist’s adept integration of glitch aesthetics, meme culture, and AR technologies to center urgent political movements within the often depoliticised atmosphere of contemporary art fairs.