A.I.R. Gallery - The 2025 A.I.R. Biennial - "Find the Body"

The 2025 A.I.R. Biennial, Find the Body, invites artists to engage with the nebulous boundary between performance and daily life, a line increasingly destabilized by the confusion inherent in our hallucinatory media landscape. Contemporary life can be disorienting. We often find ourselves caught between the tension of digital entanglements and analogue experience. We kiss our partners good night, or slide into a stranger’s Instagram DMs. We share TikToks and memes to the group chat while sitting across from each other at happy hour, then shed tears on the subway after grappling with unexpected news.

New media have given artists the means to articulate a self, as when Lynn Hershman Leeson positions herself in front of the steady gaze of a video camera to tell her life story in The Electronic Diaries. However, media can also destabilize our assumptions about authentic self-presentation, as in the proliferation of AI-generated “deep fake” portraits. In the poem from which the exhibition draws its name, Lydia Lunch likens daily life to being lost in a “film loop.” Yet, paradoxically, artifice becomes an anchor, as stylized film noirs allow her to make sense of the situation which she finds herself. Find the Body is an opportunity to reflect on the contradictory confluence of reality and artifice in our contemporary experience—and how we present our most vulnerable selves on and offline.