Still Unstable – Exhibition
Still Unstable – Exhibition
The exhibition Still Unstable brings together artistic practices that question how technological systems shape the worlds we inhabit and the futures we imagine.
Rather than approaching technology as a neutral tool or an inevitable trajectory of progress, the exhibition examines the infrastructures through which vision, extraction, automation, communication, and environmental sensing are organised. It asks how these systems determine what becomes visible, knowable, and governable, while foregrounding the ecological, political, and social realities they often conceal.
Developed on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, the exhibition, instead of celebrating the institution’s history and looking back, proposes ways to reorienting our future relationship to technology. Exhibiting works that reveal the invisible labour, extractive economies, asymmetrical power relations, and ecological costs embedded within contemporary technologies, while opening space for alternative imaginaries and other ways of relating to technological futures.
Aram Bartholl's True Depth makes the hidden infrastructures of machine vision visible. An infrared spotlight and surveillance camera transform the exhibition space into a choreography of invisible data extraction, exposing the computational gaze that continuously measures and analyses our movements beyond human perception.
Rosa Menkman's Im/Possible Images investigates the boundaries of technological vision by asking what lies beyond the limits of contemporary imaging systems. Her work reveals that every image is shaped by technical, scientific, and epistemological constraints, challenging the assumption that technology can ever produce complete representations of reality.
Anna Ehrenstein's The Language of the Soil uncovers the hidden labour sustaining artificial intelligence, connecting digital infrastructures to histories of extraction, migration, and neocolonial economies.
Kasia Molga's Chronicles from In Between 495 to 570 nm traces the ecological cost of digital technologies through copper, disappearing landscapes, and collective environmental memory.
The exhibition further shifts attention from technological systems toward their material consequences. knowbotiq's Wasteland maps landscapes devastated by extraction, where extremophile organisms suggest unexpected forms of resilience and coexistence.
Finally, Ginevra Petrozzi's Prophetai and Morehshin Allahyari's She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma reclaim prediction and mythology from algorithmic and colonial narratives. Through collective storytelling, feminist practice, and speculative fiction, both works propose futures grounded not in technological certainty but in shared imagination, care, and the possibility of living otherwise.
Marking V2_'s anniversary, the exhibition Still Unstable invites audiences to rethinking technology and imagining plural futures.
Florian Weigl, V2_Curator
The exhibition Still Unstable brings together artistic practices that question how technological systems shape the worlds we inhabit and the futures we imagine.
Rather than approaching technology as a neutral tool or an inevitable trajectory of progress, the exhibition examines the infrastructures through which vision, extraction, automation, communication, and environmental sensing are organised. It asks how these systems determine what becomes visible, knowable, and governable, while foregrounding the ecological, political, and social realities they often conceal.
Developed on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, the exhibition, instead of celebrating the institution’s history and looking back, proposes ways to reorienting our future relationship to technology. Exhibiting works that reveal the invisible labour, extractive economies, asymmetrical power relations, and ecological costs embedded within contemporary technologies, while opening space for alternative imaginaries and other ways of relating to technological futures.
Aram Bartholl's True Depth makes the hidden infrastructures of machine vision visible. An infrared spotlight and surveillance camera transform the exhibition space into a choreography of invisible data extraction, exposing the computational gaze that continuously measures and analyses our movements beyond human perception.
Rosa Menkman's Im/Possible Images investigates the boundaries of technological vision by asking what lies beyond the limits of contemporary imaging systems. Her work reveals that every image is shaped by technical, scientific, and epistemological constraints, challenging the assumption that technology can ever produce complete representations of reality.
Anna Ehrenstein's The Language of the Soil uncovers the hidden labour sustaining artificial intelligence, connecting digital infrastructures to histories of extraction, migration, and neocolonial economies.
Kasia Molga's Chronicles from In Between 495 to 570 nm traces the ecological cost of digital technologies through copper, disappearing landscapes, and collective environmental memory.
The exhibition further shifts attention from technological systems toward their material consequences. knowbotiq's Wasteland maps landscapes devastated by extraction, where extremophile organisms suggest unexpected forms of resilience and coexistence.
Finally, Ginevra Petrozzi's Prophetai and Morehshin Allahyari's She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma reclaim prediction and mythology from algorithmic and colonial narratives. Through collective storytelling, feminist practice, and speculative fiction, both works propose futures grounded not in technological certainty but in shared imagination, care, and the possibility of living otherwise.
Marking V2_'s anniversary, the exhibition Still Unstable invites audiences to rethinking technology and imagining plural futures.
Florian Weigl, V2_Curator
Medium
More at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
Incompleteness as Reorientation
9 Sept—13 Sept
V2_ poster history – Exhibition
24 Sept—18 Oct
V2_ 45 years: Still Unstable
24 Sept—26 Sept