Neïl Beloufa. Digital Mourning

In his videos, feature films, sculptures, and technologically complex installations, Beloufa plays on the viewer’s sensory experience, inviting them to reappraise their own beliefs and stereotypes.

He addresses present-day issues that range from power relationships to digital surveillance, to data collection and nationalistic ideologies, to identity and a post-colonial understanding of the world.

Neïl Beloufa’s work is strongly influenced by the world of the web, by videogames, by reality TV and political propaganda, using the vocabulary of the information age to lift the lid on the value system of a society permeated with digital technology, where everything, from food choices to human relationships is established on the basis of an algorithm.

In this process, the artist refers to himself as an editor, an assembler, who puts together information that already exists only to break it down again and show us the outcome without making any moral judgment.

The viewers thus find themselves inside immersive installations that convey a fragmented vision of reality, a universe inhabited by pop-ups and live CCTV networks that are designed to reveal both the freedom of an apparently random system and the degree of control that underpins it.

The association of the two words—“digital” and “mourning”—comes about in the encounter between an artificial world and the absence of life, in a dimension in which life itself is simulated by means of models specially created to understand its true essence.

Resembling the scenario of an “amusement” park, the space embraces a large selection of works, including the artist’s most relevant installations and walk-through sculptures. However, mimicking the current state of affairs, it is forbidden to use the “attractions” and the exhibition appears to come alive only through a series of narrative voices.

In presenting the works and explaining the viewers what to see in each area, the narrators introduce and discuss different positions, from utopian aspirations to the opinions of the youngest generation.

His works have also been shown at major group shows, including the Busan Biennale (2020), Venice Biennale (2019 and 2013), Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2018 and 2007), Taipei Biennial and Shanghai Biennale (2014), Biennale de Lyon, and Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), and Prague International Triennial of Contemporary Art (2008).