International Press Review for Olia Lialina

New Media Professor Olia Lialina is a pioneer of net art, whose work is currently receiving special attention. Virtual museum tours and zoom openings are booming, you can watch a Rembrandt on your laptop at home in a resolution of 44 gigapixels without leaving the house – but is that already net art? Surely not, Olia Lialina said back in 1997:

If something is on the net, it should speak the language of the net.

So net art does not mean the digital reproduction of images that are meant to be put up on a wall in a museum, but rather works of art that are made with the technology of the Internet and at the same time explore and represent it.

The magazine Monopol devoted an extensive article to the boom in digital exhibitions and the works of Olia Lialina, and the New York Times also conducted an extensive interview with her on the subject. The magazine Spiegel also interviewed her about the impact of the pandemic on museums.

The group exhibition “Journey into a Living Being” at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin runs until mid-August 2020, where Olia Lialina is represented with her work “Give me time/This page is no more”. This slide projector installation shows websites that have been under construction for a long time, as opposed to homepages that are no longer maintained.