Virtual Beauty, opening at Art Basel next week, explores the definition of human identity and beauty in the post-internet era
Photoshop, virtual influencers, the Bold Glamour filter, AI foundation shade finder – the convergence of beauty and digitality is having an increasing impact on our lives. Exploring this overlap is a new exhibition, Virtual Beauty, set to open June 7 at the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland. With a focus on questioning ideas of gender, sexuality, race and identity in the post-internet era, the exhibition shows how the latest digital technologies are shaping new canons of beauty today.
Bridging the virtual and physical realms, the show will feature over 20 emerging and established artists including Ines Alpha, Isamaya Ffrench and Daniel Sannwald. Through film, photography, virtual and interactive media art, Virtual Beauty unveils and examines the politics, anxieties and prejudices of the identities built by our digital lives.
“The online self is a hyper-constructed self, over which we have the power to edit, remix and recontextualise. Does this make us more self-aware – or more self-absorbed? Are we less authentic, because we think about the way we look, not simply as it presents itself in a mirror or abstractly in our minds, but in a highly curated way as it presents itself online in digital perpetuity?” says Bunny Kinney, who curated the exhibition alongside Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Mathilde Friis and Marlene Wenger.
“I think these questions underpin a lot of the work featured in the show, where different artists consider the impact of the digital world on the notion of beauty as it has evolved across these new mediums for communication and creative expression.”
The exhibition takes on an immersive approach to the discipline, set to be packed with a range of experiences including playing with Keiken and Ines Alpha's ‘virtual make-up’. The exhibition also includes the work of photographer Daniel Sannwald and Beauty_GAN, who created digitally distorted beauty filters based on Kylie Jenner for the Issue Zero of Dazed Beauty back in 2019. Alongside Jenner, other familiar faces include the internet it-girl/robot Lil Miquela and a Bjork virtual avatar will be in attendance. Elsewhere, artwork includes Hyphen-Labs’ afrofuturistic virtual reality salon for NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (2017), which offers a critical approach to the lack of multidimensional representations of Black women in technology. As well as ORLAN's Omniprésence (1993), in which the artist live-streamed her facial aesthetic surgery to challenge Western beauty ideals.
“The artists featured in the show take different approaches to the topic, creating work that challenges, criticises and even celebrates beauty ideals as digital technologies transform the way we look and the fundamental way in which we think about the notion of beauty itself,” says Kinney. “As the art in Virtual Beauty showcases, we have arrived at a moment in culture in which the self can be transformed into myriad versions, replicas, avatars, sculptures more so than ever before. The results can be sexy, silly, and even scary – but always astounding.”
Virtual Beauty concludes with Frederik Heyman’s Virtual Embalming (2018), where 3D scanned virtual icons of Isabelle Huppert, Kim Peers and Michèle Lamy are used to create digital shrines. In this way, exploring how individuals wish to be remembered in the virtual realm after death.
Virtual Beauty is at the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland, from June 7 – 18 August, 2024, alongside an accompanying public programme of events. Find out more information here.