Network Portraits

Network Portraits explores the labor and transformations required to keep websites and digital cultures alive. This includes practices such as archiving, re:mixing, re:enactment, distributed hosting, and the circulation of content across different browsers, platforms, and infrastructures. At the same time, the exhibition questions the assumption that everything must remain permanently online. What does it mean for the web to stay “alive,” and what kinds of transformations does this demand?

Olia Lialina traces networks that reflect the contexts in which the artist and her works exist at a specific moment in time. These constellations are shaped by personal relationships and social networks, technical conditions such as software, platforms, and browser infrastructures, as well as aesthetic influences. For the exhibition at panke.gallery, the works are situated within processes of contextual shifts and transformations: media remediations, jumps from one medium to another, from one platform or server to another, and across different media formats. These translations unfold between historical software and hardware installations, works using or reactivating legacy technologies, contemporary platform-based works, and physical and digital artefacts.