Shtatëmbëdhjetë and Ars Electronica present S()fia Braga’s Forehead Vulva Channeling Research at Galeria 17 in Kosovo. This speculative transhumanist project reimagines human pleasure and identity using AR technologies, challenging norms about the body through hybrid, evolving digital augmentations.
Type: Exhibition
Opening: April 4, 2023, 19:00
Duration: April 4 – June 22, 2023
City, Country: Prishtinë, Republic of Kosovo
Venue: Galeria 17, St.Henrik Bariç, no.10, Prishtinë, 10000, Republic of Kosovo
Shtatëmbëdhjetë and Ars Electronica Export present S()fia Braga’s Forehead Vulva Channeling Research at Galeria 17 in Pristina, Kosovo. The exhibition series titled Techne builds the framework for this very first collaboration between Ars Electronica and Shtatëmbëdhjetë. In this series artists, scientists and creators meet at the crossroads of technology and art. The theme seeks to align our artists and our community with a broader global discourse on technology and innovation in art and artistic creativity. S()fia Braga’s work is the perfect fit for telling this story.
The Forehead Vulva Channeling Research is a speculative transhumanist research which focuses on developing advanced studies on the human body’s potential to reach lifelong emotional well-being via a re-calibration of pleasure-centers by channeling hidden organs through the use of specialized technologies. The purpose of opening the Forehead Vulva is to bring the body to an uninhibited state, and thereby transform it, rediscovering new potentials that humans are still not aware of.
Started as a series of Forehead Vulva Channelers –a specific Augmented Reality specialized technology –, The Forehead Vulva Channeling Research found rapid support and success within centralized social media platforms, consequently creating a spontaneous worldwide online performance. The project explores the potential of technologies to transmute and shift the perception of the body through digital augmentations by creating new hybrid identities constantly changing, therefore challenging and disrupting standardized ideas on the body and its ways of performing.
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
Photo: Majlinda Hoxha
S()fia Braga is a transdisciplinary Italian artist that lives and works between Vienna and Linz. She develops her artistic research at an overlap of Digital and Post-Digital practices, experimenting with new technologies to conceive speculative fabulations that deal with topics such as Interveil-lance, transhumanism and non-human agency. S()fia’s identity constantly changes and goes hand in hand with the narratives she creates: over the last 3 years she has been an artist, a cyberstalker, a transhumanist entrepreneur, an AI auteur, and has mutated several times into a monstrous creature.
In 2022 she won the Bank Austria Studios Award and the Kunstförderpreise der Stadt Linz (UNESCO city of Media Art) for the New Media Art category. Her works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival (AT), Xie Zilong Photography Museum (CN), XII Video Vortex Conference (MT), WRO Media Art Biennale (PL), Deutsche Bank (IT), Schlossmuseum Linz (AT), Pinacoteca Albertina di Torino (IT) and more.
About Shtatëmbëdhjetë
Shtatëmbëdhjetë (17) began as a collaborative duo, with the aim of making visually and intellectually engaging artwork that explores social and psychological perspectives through experimental video art. Their work highlighted the need to re-functionalize alternative public spaces. As a result, Shtatëmbëdhjetë was registered as a foundation in 2018 in Prishtina, and operates through all Kosovo regions with its activities. Shtatëmbëdhjetë (17) envisions that citizens of all genders participate and contribute meaningfully and freely in the community and public life through culture, education and activism. Its mission is to foster positive change in society through empowering communities by means of cultural activism.
About Galeria 17
Galeria 17 – an exhibition space in Pristina – comes as a desire and need for inclusiveness and consistency of an artistic scene in fermentation, where exigency for new spaces of experimentation is vital. The presented exhibitions produce space while being reviewed and transformed. In this sense the gallery can be perceived as the space of a conch shell that arises with the clam that grows. It adapts and transforms depending on development needs, just as the common public space reflects our social structure within the labyrinths of urban progress.
Support
This activity is also supported also by Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF) program ‘EJA Kosovo’, co-financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Sweden, and Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
As well supported by Italian Embassy Kosovo, Austrian Embassy and Raiffeisen Bank.
Galeria 17
Rr.Henrik Bariç, nr.10, Prishtinë, 10000, Republika e Kosovës
+383 (0) 49 170 078 | galeria17@foundation17.org | www.galeria17.org