Retrospective at the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen – Olia Lialina: online since 1996

As part of the first generation of net artists, Lialina utilised the technical structures of the internet from the very beginning to create browser-based works that played a pivotal role in establishing an entirely new artistic medium and a new immateriality in art.

Early on, she explored both the narrative possibilities of the web as well as the manifestations of an online culture that was only just beginning to emerge and develop its own structures and modes of existence. Like a digital archaeologist, she archives and preserves the aesthetic potentials of these beginnings in numerous works and series.

They demonstrate that the web initially functioned as a heterogeneous, democratic space that both challenged and enabled user’s creativity and individual forms of expression. It was only its subsequent co-optation by commercial interests, coupled with the premise of “user-friendliness”, that the sleek user interfaces characterising the internet as we know it today came to dominate.

Olia Lialina’s practice therefore consistently carries a media-critical dimension that reveals what usually remains hidden. Her works can thus also be understood as an appeal to users to empower themselves and understand the technical mechanisms behind digital interfaces in order to reclaim the free and decentralised character of the World Wide Web.