Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina’s exhibition online since 1996 offers a comprehensive insight into the work of the net art pioneer through pieces spanning the last 30 years.

As part of a generation that discovered the internet in the 1990s, she used its technical capabilities from the outset to create browser-based artworks that played a pivotal role in establishing an entirely new artistic medium and a new form of immateriality in art.

From an early stage, she explored both its narrative possibilities and the manifestations of an online culture that was only just beginning to take shape and develop its own structures and modes of existence. Like a digital archaeologist, she archives and preserves the aesthetic potential of this period in numerous works and series. They demonstrate that the early web was a heterogeneous, democratic space that challenged and enabled users’ creativity and individual modes of expression. It was only the subsequent co-optation by commercial interests – coupled with the premise of ‘user-friendliness’ – that led to conformity and the sleek user interfaces that characterise the internet as we know it today.

Her practice thus always carries an underlying media criticism, revealing what usually remains hidden. It encourages us, the users, to empower ourselves to understand the technical mechanisms behind those user interfaces, thereby reclaiming the liberating nature of the World Wide Web.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, June 27, 2026, 7 p.m.
Curator: Hannah Eckstein