sevrajă

In a world where social networks and technology connect us and seemingly facilitate communication, loneliness and isolation are omnipresent and widespread emotional and social states. Even in this world where we are surrounded by others and by technology, people feel lonely and isolated, experiencing intense inner struggles, falling prey to anxiety, being overwhelmed by depression, longing to belong but failing to do so, escaping into imagination and fantasy, chasing desires they do not understand or cannot fulfill.

ATOMA starts from her own experience, going through a period of self-awareness of her own feelings, and this process finds expression in the works on display. ATOMA explores in her recognizable style loneliness and isolation and how we relate to them today. She arrives at the idea that we find ourselves in this situation because social networks offer us things that seemingly fit us and, at the same time, provide us with a dose of dopamine, which initially stimulates us and then becomes necessary. Social media algorithms create a bubble that keeps us in the system and radicalizes us. “The role of disinformation is not to make us believe in something, but to make us stop believing in anything, to consider that nothing matters anymore,” says the artist. Her interest in technology co-dependence is overt, both intellectually and in terms of her own artistic expression. She adds: “Attention is the most important resource of the modern capitalist world. It is a finite resource, and corporations fight to attract our attention. Attention is like a drug for the individual, the first dose is strong, but then we develop a tolerance to a certain level and want more and more. If the level of attention drops, we enter withdrawal.”

The artist resorts to pills as physical objects that she integrates into her works to create textures, as an obvious symbol of dependence. Another hallmark in the works of this series are VR glasses, whose representation, sometimes schematic, sometimes figurative, is an element that simultaneously symbolizes technology and our dependence on it; they become the focal point of the artwork. It is a contradiction meant to underline the de facto situation: virtual reality glasses make us escape from a real world and transpose us into a virtual one where we find the feeling of fulfillment, victory, problem-solving. They are a symbol of technology and the virtual world, distancing us from reality, from ourselves, from authentic things, with both good and bad, offering only instant gratification and illusion. The viewer has the advantage of observing important details that the subjects of the works do not have access to; in this sense, the artist refers in each portrait to inner universes – categories that become the essence of humanity and transcend age, gender, and origin.

November 16th – December 11th, 2023, Bucharest
Text by Daniel Kozak