During the past few months, our art curator and researcher Adele Jarrar has been leading a collaboration between Taxir and the Mozilla Festival, which will debut on the festival’s platform the 20th of March and run for five days.
The virtual exhibition, titled ‘Is the Machine Learning Art History?’ takes a look at the increasing role that algorithms play today in curating and censoring art works online. As the curatorial statement reads, we live today in world where “social media serves as the primary platform for artists to exhibit their works and the artist-entrepreneur model has evolved into the artist-influencer, we must consider the implications of algorithms on the future of art as they became the curator”, referring to how social media algorithms get to decide which art works will be promoted, which ones will get pushed back, and most importantly, which ones will be taken down.
In response, the exhibition showcases a group of artworks that were taken down by social media algorithms, bringing together artists from the Arab world and beyond, including: Hassane Chami (Lebanon), Mihai Moldovanu (Moldova) Omar Hegazy (Egypt), Mary Abuzaid (Jordan), Martin Derbyshire (China/UK), Abdulla Nowarah (Jordan/Palestine), and Ahmad Fawzy Emara (Egypt).
To attend the exhibition, head over to this link to reserve your tickets for MozillaFestival, you can do that for free or pay as you can. Afterwards, you will receive an email with a login link, which you can use to log into the festival’s platform here, and add the exhibition to your calendar.
This exhibition is a part of the X, Y, Z series, curated by Adele. The series debuted with a virtual exhibition in New Art City titled ‘We are sorry to inform you that …‘, taking a look at rejected artworks and the role of exhibition spaces as a gate keeper. The next exhibition of the series will be a virtual exhibition in Decentraland’s decentralized metaverse platform, and will be titled ‘Enchanted Territories’.
