As the World Wide Web evolves towards the Web 3.0 age, digital media such as video games, apps, and the internet have spawned their own forms of culture and means of self-expression. The exhibition Digital Amalgamations brings together artists Skawennati, Sondi, Shaheer Zazai, Ryker Woodward, and LuYang to highlight how each artist's practice is in conversation with the digital landscapes they portray in relation to markers of their own identity, such as race, gender, age, and situatedness.
Human existence within a multitude of digital cyberspaces has blurred the separation between “artificial” reality and physical reality. As discussed in Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, we are now, and have always been cyborgs – evolved to become bodies beyond flesh: avatars of ourselves. All five artists in Digital Amalgamations explore and re-think what it means to exist within contemporary time and space: introducing new modes of creating and experiencing art of various mediums, while questioning: how do we exist as humans within digital cyberspaces, and within our highly digitized times? How is the creation of art affected under various socio-political conditions?
As such, a re-analysis of how we exist within our contemporary digitized condition is in order, and to question what it even means to be a body within the current time. Digital Amalgamations sets out to showcase diverse viewpoints on how artists, under contemporary social and technological conditions, express formations of their identity: exploring the multiplicities, (re)imaginings, temporalities, and fluidities of the self. Visitors are invited to evaluate their own relationships with, and reliance on digital technologies, as well as question their preconceived notions of what digital art, and digital art histories, can look like.
About
Skawennati
Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others.
Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-founded and co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University, where she received her BFA. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.
Sondi
Sondi (she/her) is a new media artist from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands. Her work is deeply rooted in her identity as a person of the diaspora and serves as a conduit to unravel the intricate and intimate layers of identity, belonging, ownership, and heritage. Her artistic process centers around worldbuilding, drawing inspiration from Black science fiction and visionary fiction writers to create virtual environments where memory, ancestry, and imagination come into being. In these virtual dreamscapes, she explores new modes of being, using the power of radical imagination.
Sondi builds worlds primarily through immersive 3D videos engineered with game engines that continuously navigate between virtual and physical spaces to investigate the intersection of technology and culture. By examining how popular media constructs and disseminates images and ideas, her work challenges dominant cultural narratives that shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. Her body of work reflects on the interplay between our corporeal, spiritual, and digital selves and spans a diverse range of mediums, including game design, audiovisual performance, theater, music, film, and education.
Her work and collaborations have been exhibited at museums, galleries and media art festivals such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Dutch Design Week (NL), Brakke Grond Amsterdam (NL), Nieuw Instituut Rotterdam (NL), Museum Arnhem (NL), Kunshal KAdE Amersfoort (NL), Schauspielhaus Zurich (CH) and ACUD Gallery Berlin (DE)
Shaheer Zazai
Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. Zazai received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist in residence at OCAD University as part of the Digital Painting Atelier in 2015.
Zazai’s practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora. The digital works revolve around Microsoft Word and imagery reminiscent of traditional Afghan carpets. Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own designs in Microsoft Word, where every knot of a carpet is translated into a typed character. While the digital is a process based exploration, the paintings have been an internal investigation into vulnerability and fear.
Over the years Zazai’s material vocabulary has expanded into textile work, site-specific public art installations and video works with his lens becoming self-reflective. Some of his recent notable exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, Latcham Art Centre, Patel Brown Gallery, Owens Art Gallery. Zazai is currently part of a group exhibition at Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Zealand and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Art Gallery of Mississauga opening in January 2026.
Ryker Woodward
Ryker Woodward (born in 1998, in San Diego, California) currently lives and works in Monterey, California.
Ryker moved to Portland, Oregon in 2017, to attain an BFA in Painting and drawing from the Pacific Northwest College of Art where he graduated from in 2022.
LuYang
Lu Yang is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist based in Tokyo and Shanghai. His work, deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy, explores themes of life, technology, and spirituality. Among his many notable works, the recent series "DOKUSHODOKUSHI" uses his digital persona to address contemporary human issues and aims to spread Buddhist wisdom. Lu Yang extensively utilizes computer graphics (CG) technology and game engines as creative media, collaborating with experts from various fields such as scientists, psychologists, designers, and music producers.
His recent solo museum exhibitions include the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, the Mudec Museum in Milan, the Kunsthalle Basel Museum in Switzerland, the Palais Populaire in Berlin, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museumin Denmark, the Kunstpalais Museum in Erlangen, and MOCA Cleveland in the USA. He participated in the Venice Biennale in both 2015 and 2022 and has been involved in other major museum exhibitions and biennials/triennials. Lu Yang was awarded the BMW Art Journey in 2019 and was also the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award in 2022.
Anna Be
Anna Be is a second year candidate in the Master of Art History in Critical and Curatorial Studies program at UBC, where she also received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art. Anna’s curatorial research is focused on learning about how artist practices are informed by their personal interactions with digital cyberspaces and technology. She is also interested in exploring and re-thinking how art, especially new media art, is curated, displayed, viewed, accessed, and circulated. Currently, she works and resides in British Columbia, throughout the unceded ancestral and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Peoples.
This exhibition is presented with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
