Curated by Jerome Neuters
Is digital technology encouraging the communication of our emotions? Daniah Al Saleh questions in this show the obligation to smile to everything in our digital era’s messages brought by the emoji’s fashion. The emoji phenomenon has been developed massively around for 20 years, in the same parallel time of the booming development of the digital facilities which placed the computer at the right center of our social and economic lives. Art is part of this global digital world. It is not a casualty if Daniah Alsaleh is exploring the emojis language through an art medium which is also a language itself. Indeed, Computing is a techno-logy, meaning a technique which is also a language. Daniah Alsaleh’s exhibition looks like a mise en abyme: a language technique exploring another language format. Perhaps only this form of art could explore enough deeply the emojis language – as a form of language (achieved or not)? Confronting an immaterial expression of her vision with a material one in the same show is another major aspect of Daniah’s work. The show is articulated in two parallel movements, presenting digital works facing a series of paintings, all focused on the same theme of the emojis language. A last section offers a conclusion to this highly original confrontation, through a very innovative installation, mixing painting and digital projection. Daniah Al Saleh reminds us that the said “immaterial” world is nothing but another kind of “material”.
When the art world often opposes “digital” exhibitions versus painting exhibitions, Daniah imposes her art beyond the banal statements about digital art we can hear. Daniah’s works question also the visual identity of the Emojis, born in the code after the smiley graphic inspiration. The Emojis phenomenon is as well a mere computing form of visual communication as a pictographic code. A visual object balanced between its digital and graphic identities. No other artist before Daniah has found the right expression to raise this ambiguous essence of the emojis - though the smiley was used in many art works. Daniah choses as her subject the emoticonist culture of our time - certainly the most fascinating topic raised by the Emojis. A philosophical issue matching with a digital era who wants absolutely to be ultra positive despite all the turmoiled aspects of it.
