Artists explore physical and digital identity in Pärnu exhibition

Artists Kertu Rannula and Rebeca Žukovitš are examining how perceptions of the body and self change when identity exists simultaneously in the physical and digital worlds, ERR reported. Their joint exhibition, “Dialogues of Digital Girls,” is open at the Pärnu City Gallery in the city’s artists’ house.

The exhibition brings together sculptures, videos, sound and internet culture with slow, handcrafted processes. The artists share a generational experience of growing up alongside internet culture, remembering childhood before the internet while increasingly shaping their identities through digital environments.

“We have worked on our own bodies as if they were material and transformed them into digital forms,” Rannula told the programme Aktuaalne kaamera. “The starting point was the experience of looking at our own distorted digital copy. From these digital bodies, it developed further into digital spaces and the public digital sphere.”

Rannula said the exhibition also addresses disappearing virtual spaces and the phenomenon of being “always online”. At the same time, she noted, the dead internet theory suggests that people have almost disappeared from these spaces.

Žukovitš said the exhibition began with an interest in the body and its extension before moving into digital spaces. The artists have now also brought their sense of the body into physical form, creating what she called an “identity centrifuge”, in which the body and identity move from the physical to the digital, from the digital into new matter and back into the real world.