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Gallery Surfing Session with Sofi Xian & Evan Roth
15 September 2026 from 19:00 – 21:00
gallery surfing
About the event
The event takes place in the frame of our exhibition Network Portraits.
Great art rarely exists in a vacuum. It develops through conversations, references, infrastructures, and encounters that extend across generations. In this live gallery surfing session, Sofi Xian and Evan Roth come together to navigate their own work through the lens of a shared influence: pioneering net artist Olia Lialina.
The connections take different forms. Roth’s Red Lines and Lialina’s Summer both explore the distributed nature of the web, turning the network itself – its servers, locations, and connections—into part of the work. Sofi Xian’s practice opens another connection through internet archaeology: her work with the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI) resonates with Lialina’s long-term research into vernacular web culture and the GeoCities Research Institute.
Through live browsing and conversation, the artists will reflect on these connections and on how Lialina’s work has informed their own ways of thinking about networks, archives, and online culture
About the Artists
Sofi Xian (冼納然, also Sofia Lee) is a researcher, cultural theorist, and multimedia artist based in Rotterdam, NL. Informed by a diverse background spanning computational linguistics, experimental photography, cinema, and sound art, she charts the semiotic terrain of consumer culture and theorises its evolution. Her particular focuses are on how unpopular, naïve, marginal, repetitive and forgotten detritus of culture serve as potent reservoirs of emergent aesthetics and ambient meaning formations. As a founding member of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, Sofi has pioneered approaches to 'consumer aesthetics' and contributed foundational research on the aesthetic Frutiger Aero, a term she also coined along with Froyo Tam.
Evan Roth has been making work in arts institutions, in public spaces, and on the internet, resulting in paintings, installations, videos, and websites. Based in Berlin, Roth's practice visualizes, archives, and challenges our perceptions of typically unseen aspects of rapidly changing communication technologies. Often by way of unintended uses of tools and technologies, his work addresses the personal and cultural effects surrounding these changes and the role of individual agency within the media landscape.