Artist: Carmen Roca Igual
Exhibition title: Tan lines from a Spiritual Retweet
Venue: 1646, The Hague, The Netherlands
Date: September 9 – October 23, 2022
Photography: Jhoeko / Ariane Toussaint / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and 1646, The Hague
Note: Carmen Roca Igual in conversation with This is Jackalope is available here
How can we explore ourselves by means of change?
Find the exhibition space of 1646 transforming again. For ‘Tan lines from a Spiritual retweet’, Carmen Roca Igual welcomes you into a surreal but strangely familiar world. This world allows us to question the relation between both our inner and outer experiences. As our daily lives increasingly merge with our online presence, realities seem to blur. How do they influence each other, and how do they connect?
Trying on different masks and personas
The possibility to continuously reinvent ourselves is ever present in a digitalised world, merging us with our technologies. Selfies, face filters, deep fakes: they make us actors of our appearances and can all bring us closer to what we want to be. With two new video installations that will be on view in the exhibition, Carmen explores the meaning of getting to know oneself by transforming and trying on different masks and personas. Grandma’s taking a selfie, raver kids hanging up their parents’ laundry, women in labor, and actresses playing the role of being watched… Through her work, Carmen looks at cultural phenomena and myths to touch on identity, reality, storytelling, gossip and representation. Inviting us to embrace change as an opportunity to explore ourselves.
About Carmen Roca Igual
Carmen Roca Igual (b. 1998, Paris) is a lens-based artist researching human behavior and the social makeup we apply in relation to new media. Her work combines identity, technology, empowerment and the role of new media, but also the essential pursuit of communication, spirituality, and connection that most humans are in search of. She researches and explores experiences through fictional characters as a proxy to hers and society’s dilemmas. The characters live through contemporary narratives as they discover how to utilize the content they create in this attention economy.
Roca Igual graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2020. Her work was officially selected for the #AmLatino Film Festival and was nominated for the Young Talent Award during Dutch Design Week. She has assisted artists and filmmakers Amalia Ulman and Pauline Curnier Jardin, and her work was shown before in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rijeka, and The Hague.
