Emma Adler
7he Grea7 Rese7
@MARTINETZ, Cologne, 2022​​

Glossy surfaces, skin-like structures, walls of exposed concrete are not all they pretend to be. What is real and what is fake? What does real even mean – in a world where virtual reality has long since become physical reality itself, when avatars function as prosthetic identities and bodies become unbalanced through simulations? Trapped in repetitive patterns that run through the exhibition like open tabs bearing error codes, caught somewhere between analogue and digital, between truth and lies, eye and brain in an irresolvable conflict of senses.

The artist Emma Adler casts a spotlight on the shallowness of the internet by means of immersive installations and examines human perception as the key to understanding the world by means of different levels of reality. Conspiracy theories and the relationship between reality and media representation stand at the centre of her work.

7HE GREA7 RESE7 is the second part of a new series of work that illuminates conspiracy-based concepts in the „post-factual“ age between pandemic and populism. Under the magnifying glass of the pandemic conspiracies began to spread on YouTube that have since continued to shoot out of the ground like worms, countless arms reaching out like tentacles to grab our feet and drag us down into the swamp of what is a mostly quite brown ideology. (…) One of these narratives revolves around The Great Reset, an initiative by the World Economic Forum that, under the guise of an invented pandemic, has been reinterpreted as a planned power grab by „global financial elites“.

Julia Stellmann