INDEX Biennial of Art and Technology / Braga |

“Majority rule no longer means anything when nobody trusts anybody. Doing something just because 51% of those who voted said so is starting to feel really, really stupid. No idea is now too stupid to fail,” an unidentified voice remarks from a bathroom stall throughout a summer season celebration in 2016 in Pedro Gossler’s three-channel video set up Fanfictional Politics (2022), introduced at Theatro Circo as a part of the third version of the INDEX Biennial of Art and Technology in Braga, Portugal. As although the monologue have been unfolding within the viewer’s personal thoughts, actuality is remodeled right into a dreamlike ambiance drenched in inexperienced mild, whereas David Guetta’s 2009 hit music “Sexy Bitch” pulses faintly within the background. 

Intending to discover the a number of relationships between technological growth and its affect on the social, cultural, and political formations that form our up to date situation — in addition to the inequalities that emerge from them — this version of INDEX, that includes an exhibition program curated by Joel Valabrega, addresses topical points on algorithmic violence, surveillance, and domination by way of a variety of creative and discursive views. Although Valabrega launched the exhibition by warning audiences that it will supply extra questions than solutions, the fragmented exhibition nonetheless advances a transparent and daring methodological proposition: whereas energy constructions proceed to threaten social justice and interpersonal — in addition to interspecies — relationships, in addition they generate the circumstances for brand new types of resistance. 

Moving by way of the 5 venues of the exhibition, one query retains resurfacing: Are fictional narratives finally the simplest solution to mirror on actuality? This speculation emerges not solely from the rising problem of distinguishing truth from fiction as our materials and digital realities change into more and more intertwined, but in addition from the problem of imagining a decision throughout a time when the magnitude of terror continues to broaden past comprehension. Because energy so typically operates by way of invisible, diffuse, and difficult-to-grasp mechanisms, our understanding of it — from surveillance applied sciences to internalized patterns of consumption — ceaselessly is dependent upon hypothesis. Throughout the biennial, artists try and decode energy and its constructions. These dynamics are immediately explored within the two installations introduced at Forum Braga, albeit by way of opposing dialogical constructions. In Gabriel Abrantes’s Bardo Loops (2024), ghosts debate the complexities of up to date social and interpersonal dynamics. The voices rising from the four-channel set up overlap and dissolve into each other, filling the house with a discursive polyphony that intertwines the cartoonish with private drama and intergenerational trauma. Conversely, in Jonna Kina’s video work Secret Words and Related Stories (2016), kids achieve entry to adults’ most intimate confessions by way of digital passwords shared on-line: private secrets and techniques are learn aloud, reclaimed, and remodeled into scripts for a collective efficiency. 

Death permeates all 5 venues of the exhibition, showing each as a violent consequence of human motion and an unavoidable situation of bodily existence. Death is approached right here in a twofold method. While it’s inevitably embedded within the politics and inequalities formed by energy, it is usually a subject onto which people and civilizations have projected hypothesis, perception, and creativeness for hundreds of years. Stuart McLean writes that modernity “with its social upheavals, its armed conflicts, its military technologies, and its mass media, has produced not only death but also the spectacle of death on an unprecedented scale,”¹ whereas concurrently diminishing the social presence of the useless. Yet all through INDEX, the useless proceed to inhabit the identical areas because the residing spectators, resisting “the forensic turn in contemporary humanities [that] has contributed to the shift towards a more ontological and empirical approach to the past.”² 

Scattered on a deep purple carpet, twelve metallic griefbots compose Stine Deja’s set up GRAVE MATTERS (2025): hybrid technological coffins that embed screens displaying AI-generated simulations of deceased family members. Accompanied by a soundscape that includes the chirping of birds and organ music, grief, wellness, and contemplation merge into an unsettling ambiance of post-human sanitation: the sound subtle all through the house blends pure parts with synthetic manipulations, evoking practices of meditation and their attendant types of consumerism, suggesting that know-how, in its obvious omnipotence, can now do every thing — even reconcile us with those that are now not right here. By distinction, the sonic atmosphere created by Mira M. Yang’s sculpture sequence “rain real soon” (2024), echoing by way of the corridors of the Mosteiro de Tibães, evokes the traces of previous lives by way of each discarded city supplies collected from the streets of Paris and the resonant rhythms of pungmul percussion. Rooted in shamanic traditions in addition to the scholar uprisings of Eighties Gwangju, these sounds remodel the monastery into an area haunted by each reminiscence and resistance. 

Reflections on our relationship with — or subjugation to — totally different types of energy are sometimes approached by way of a humorousness that oscillates between exhilarating and deeply uncomfortable. Whether a software for coping or for resisting in a spot of wrestle, irony is strongly current in lots of works. Cemile Sahin’s BB – Born to Bloom (2025) TikTokifies the connection between militarization and nature throughout Switzerland and Kurdistan, each within the structure of the projected movies, which recollects the vertical format of a smartphone display, and within the rhythm established by way of the enhancing, which pairs pulsating music with a fast succession of photographs. Combining references that vary from Grimes to Hello Kitty and Heidi in a postmodern pastiche, the glittering two-channel set up destabilizes dominant narratives that body the Swiss Alps as a web site of militarized neutrality and the Kurdish mountains as a heavenly land, as if nature’s wilderness may anticipate a desired freedom. 

“Am I free? Are you free? Are we free? Are we too free?” The voice in Fanfictional Politics continues from inside the bathroom stall. If dying persists as a pervasive and violent presence, it might additionally change into a chance to rethink our relationship to the afterlife. If social media more and more blur the excellence between critique and propaganda, they’ll additionally present a shared language by way of which energy might be ridiculed and destabilized. And if the up to date artwork world itself seems more and more paradoxical and insufficient as a framework by way of which to confront these points, then we would as nicely permit ourselves to have some enjoyable.