ABOUT THE EXHIBIT_
 

403 FORBIDDEN is a digital exhibition that explores the way identity and ownership are maintained and negotiated in digital spaces. At the apex of the Digital Revolution, we have become experts at building and curating our online identity which transcends our physical limitations. As we carefully navigate sensibilities of taste and content, form judgements, and learn from immaterial interactions with one another, we establish our critical consciousness. This agency is a right of passage. It draws us closer to our two-dimensional avatars and allows us to see beyond the scope of their purely representational function. They are us and we are them.

 

Participating artists Julia Makivic, Zhazha Zhang and Jenn Liv explore the connection between the digital and physical realms, considering notions of identity and presence. Through surreal game design, Julia Makivic showcases how people turn to social media as a tactic to reaffirm their identity with narrative and emphasizes themes of performativity, gender identity, displacement and vulnerability. Similarly, Zhazha Zhang invites the viewer to embark on a journey of discovery through immersion and fragmentation as she conceptualizes digital versions of her thoughts and memories. Building on this, Jenn Liv considers forms of hyperreality that stem from digital discourse, whereabout each visual replication of the real self becomes an entity of its own, a nod to Jean Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra and Simulation. 

 

In the space of blurred boundaries, we become cognizant of our intellectual property—our thoughts, our words, our feelings—which have been forfeited to “free” services through End-User License Agreements. The state of ownership is suddenly a battlefield and our digital presence is co-opted as a surveillance threat or as a means of profit gain. Instead of the promise of a democratic space for creativity and community-building, state and corporate intervention reveal themselves as having disproportionate power over what content gets distributed and socialized, and how. 

 

Through artworks that are immersive and relatable, 403 FORBIDDEN seeks to answer questions of how we define ownership in a space where privacy is abstract and claim ownership of our likeness?