Madina Mahomedova uses artificial intelligence and new media in her work. She sees the development of technology and digitalization as forces pushing humanity towards a posthuman society, and her art seeks to explore, report on and problematize this transformation.
The artist works both independently and on collaborative projects. Together with Frederik De Bleser, a Belgian artist, she forms an artistic duo, and the fruit of their work was the interactive installation Does AI Dream of Gender? at the Geppert Gallery in Wrocław (2022). The main issue addressed in the project was the question of how the world, both virtual and physical, affects our understanding of what gender is.
In addition to projects of an installation nature, Mahomedova does interactive performances and plays. She is currently affiliated with the digital culture research centre at Sint Lucas Antwerpen, and her current interests and work explore ideas related to memory and forgetting. She explores how artificial intelligence and other emerging new technologies can deconstruct our understanding of a wide range of cultural concepts and phenomena – memory/forgetting, identity, the nature of human interaction and interaction with technology, intimacy, eroticism, social relations, professed value systems and aesthetics, attitudes toward innate mortality and the limitations of the physical self, the emergence of hybrid, biological-machine entities – and ultimately affect the way we remember and forget.
Mahomedova has presented her work at many important international contemporary art forums, from the WRO Biennale in Wrocław to ChampdAction LAbO in Antwerp. She is simultaneously developing her career as a designer, focusing on digital media.
She takes part in the Polish Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale in 2024 with her AI-mirror project. In her work – originally co-created with Frederik de Bleser – Mohamedova employs present-day media technologies: an innovative, neuromorphic A.I. that observes visitors and puts their gender identity to the test. Mohamedova’s work is an exceedingly rare case of creative and technological autonomy from contemporary media tools. The artist doesn’t rely on existing ready-made services, but independently creates a system, whose very existence challenges the status quo of surveillance capitalism.
