A Tate Modern-focused cultural roundup examines how avatars, proxies and digital twins are reshaping gender, labor, memory and power—through moving image, film and media art.
Tate Modern’s current moving-image momentum isn’t just about new screens—it’s about new ways of being seen.
The exhibition’s central proposition feels urgent: avatars. proxies and digital twins are no longer sci‑fi props but cultural tools.. Misryoum readers encounter a theme that runs across contemporary media art—identity as something built. performed. and sometimes negotiated with systems that don’t fully belong to us.. Across film, photography, sound and installation, artists treat digital technologies as part of everyday life, not a distant future.
A major thread is the body—how it appears, who it serves, and what it can imagine.. Charmaine Poh’s practice moves through photography. film and performance to question the gendered body and the labor of the everyday. expanding those questions into near‑tech possibilities.. In her world. the online and offline aren’t separate realms; they fold into each other. making space for queer “world making” that can feel both intimate and speculative.. That approach matters culturally because it challenges the idea that tech simply amplifies existing norms.. Instead, Misryoum sees art using technology as a rehearsal space for alternative social arrangements.
The show also places creative attention on how value systems reorganize the physical world.. Femke Herregraven’s work examines financial markets and risk, translating abstract logics into sculptures, drawings, films and hybrid installations.. Her recurring interest in the financialization of the future reads like a warning embedded in aesthetics—especially when she explores catastrophe bonds as speculative instruments for redistributing risk and disaster.. It’s a reminder that “digital” doesn’t only mean images and avatars.. It can also mean the cold architecture of capital, turning vulnerability into an investment structure.
Across other practices, history and mythology return as operating systems for the present.. Josèfa Ntjam weaves narratives drawn from investigations into historical events. scientific functions and philosophical concepts. bringing African mythology. ancestral rituals and religious symbolism into conversation with science fiction.. The effect is less about mixing genres for decoration and more about insisting that knowledge systems travel.. Misryoum’s cultural lens here is clear: when art stitches multiple epistemologies together. it resists a single storyline about what counts as “real” or “modern.”
Another strand focuses on narrative spaces—especially those shaped by communities often sidelined in mainstream cultural discourse.. Ana María Millán combines local stories with collaborative rehearsals. creating animation as a way to invent and (re‑)claim meaningful space.. Her close collaboration with video gamers and Live Action Role Play communities signals a shift in who gets to author futures.. Animation. in this context. becomes less a purely visual medium and more a participatory culture engine: rules. roles and fantasy worlds become training grounds for belonging.
Time, too, behaves differently in this curatorial constellation.. Priyageetha Dia’s practice moves between computed-generated imagery. performance and archival materials. braiding “speculation of the tropics” with ancestral intelligence within the machine.. The work urges deeper contemplation around labour. colonial histories and identity—an insistence that computational processes don’t erase the past.. Instead, they can make the past newly legible, if artists and audiences learn how to read the machine.
Stephanie Comilang and Misryoum viewers are asked to consider the future and the past as aligned rather than opposed.. Comilang’s films juxtapose temporality, geography and technology to address diasporas, generations, survival, violence and desire.. Her documentary approach, described through narratives that inhabit multiple voices and perspectives, centers social mobility, global labor and cross-cultural communication.. In cultural terms, that’s a powerful reframing: documentary isn’t limited to recording what happened.. It can also document how people navigate systems that shape desire and movement across borders.
What ties these practices together is not a single “tech aesthetic. ” but a shared concern with mediation—how platforms and models stand in for lived experience.. Avatars can become proxies for the self; digital twins can mirror environments; moving images can function like translators between contexts.. The ethical question beneath the spectacle is whether these representations expand agency or deepen control.. Misryoum reads the exhibition as an answer in motion: artists treat mediation as contested territory. and they make the contest visible.
For audiences. this matters because our cultural identity is increasingly negotiated through images we didn’t directly author—recommendation feeds. biometric categories. platform interfaces. and the language of data.. Art like this doesn’t offer a simple escape from those systems.. Instead, it models a different relationship to them: critique through form, imagination through collaboration, and memory through remixing.. If avatars and digital twins are becoming everyday infrastructures. Misryoum suggests the real question is who gets to design them—and whose bodies. histories and risks are reflected when “the future” is rendered.