RestArt Reality Season

We no longer take images at face value. Photographs no longer prove what they once did, and synthetic media, deepfakes, and AI-generated content have made it harder to trust what we see. Rather than trying to restore certainty, many artists work within this ambiguity, using fiction, speculation, and constructed narratives to explore how reality is shaped and understood.

This season invited us to revisit forgotten histories, imagined archives, fragmented memories, and alternative versions of reality. Some artists turned to personal recollections, others to political narratives, mythology, or emerging technologies. What connected them was not a shared aesthetic, but a shared question: what is reality?

Nour Ouayda explored traces, absences, and the fragility of memory. Ranbir Kaleka led us through spaces suspended between recollection and perception. Nina E. Schönefeld immersed us in landscapes shaped by media anxiety, political tension, and technological collapse. Anhar Salem invited us into an intimate diary of everyday life, while Riar Rizaldi moved between science, mythology, and the economic realities of contemporary Indonesia.

The season's curatorial selections approached similar questions from different angles. "Infinite Play", curated by Alessandra Bergamaschi and Rudá Babau, looked at platforms as spaces where identities and systems of visibility are constantly negotiated. "Feedback Loops of the Real and the Fake" by Jürgen Hagler and Daniela Duca De Tey examined reality as something increasingly shaped by images, algorithms, and synthetic media. "Solar Prospects" by Vanina Saracino reflected on the sun as a cultural, ecological, and political force, while "Initiating Encounters" by Masha Godovannaya explored dialogue and the possibility of meeting the unfamiliar. "PROMPTOSCAPE" by Nan MA and Dajuin Yao turned to AI and its growing influence on image-making, language, memory, and imagination.

Reality is not fixed. Histories are rewritten, technologies increasingly act on our behalf, and the boundaries between the real and the constructed continue to blur. Looking back, RestArt Reality was less about finding certainty than learning to live with uncertainty.

Curatorial Selections

Throughout the season, we presented five curated playlists that approached RestArt Reality from different angles. Together, they explored how images circulate, how technology influences perception, how memories are constructed, and how new narratives emerge in a world where reality feels increasingly unstable. Bringing together artists and curators from around the world, these selections returned to a shared question: what is reality, and how might it be reimagined?

Solo Exhibitions

The season’s solo shows are CIFRA’s digital interpretation of the traditional solo exhibition format. Rather than surveying an artist’s entire practice, each presentation focuses on a selection of works that resonate with the season’s theme. Introduced by a curatorial text, these exhibitions bring together key projects by a single artist or collective, offering a focused entry point into their work.

Representing different generations, geographies, and artistic approaches, the featured artists offer distinct perspectives on the questions at the heart of RestArt Reality. Their exhibitions explore how realities are constructed, mediated, challenged, and reimagined, revealing different ways of navigating an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.

German artist Nina E. Schönefeld takes you on a cinematic journey through fear, hope, and resistance. Across a series of short films, you move through illusions, media noise, and digital decay — a world disturbingly close to our own. You can watch it in one continuous flow or pause between films to reflect; each piece opens a new chapter in the same unfolding story.

“Between What We See and What We Know” presents works by Ranbir Kaleka, an artist who has worked at the intersection of video, painting, sound, and light for more than three decades. Born in India and living across multiple cultural contexts, Kaleka was among the first to approach video not as a carrier of images, but as a space for experiencing time and the act of looking itself.

The exhibition presents works by Nour Ouayda from Lebanon, a filmmaker and artist whose practice unfolds between cinema, sound, text, and memory. Rather than telling linear stories, her films move through traces, absences, and fragmented recollections, where meaning emerges gradually and often remains unresolved.

Anhar Salem, born in Jeddah in 1993 to a family of Yemeni and Indonesian descent, has developed a strong awareness of different cultural contexts. Most of her films are shot on a phone camera, which is always close at hand — often in a back pocket. Its ease strips away the pretension often associated with traditional video artist tools, turning it into something neutral and social.

In his practice Riar Rizaldi straddles contemporary art, cinema, science fiction, documentary, and horror. For him, who lives and works in Indonesia, horror is not simply a genre or form of entertainment, but a way of observing reality. One of the artist’s key interests is the coexistence of science and mysticism, not as opposites, but as different ways of describing the same reality.

1 / 5

Educational Meetups

Bringing together artists, curators, and thinkers from around the world, the meetups offered deeper insight into the questions explored throughout the season

Reloading Identity | CIFRA Meetup

What happens when the self becomes both material and medium? This conversation examines how artists reshape and reinvent reality through the lens of identity. As political and algorithmic systems expand their influence, this gathering explores the “other self” — the double, avatar, or data-shadow — as a space for resistance and reimagination.

Meetup members

Janez Janša

@Janez

Jess Tucker

@jesstuckerstudio

Jacek Sosnowski

@curating666

LIU Guangli

@liuguangli

Hacking Surveillance | CIFRA Meetup

In this CIFRA meetup Inside the Black Box, part of our RestArt Reality season, OONA and !Mediengruppe Bitnik join curator Anika Meier to reveal decades of hacking surveillance systems through art, turning cameras into collaborators and control into play.

Meetup members

The Second-Guess

@TheSecondGuess

!Mediengruppe Bitnik

@mediengruppe_bitnik

OONA

@OONA

Anika Meier

@AnikaMeier

Watching Media Art. Li Zhenhua | CIFRA Meetup

What even is media art today? Hit play on this recording of our CIFRA meetup with Li Zhenhua — a curator and artist who’s been in the game since the ’90s. We get into how media art went from garage experiments to Art Basel, why 9-hour video art actually makes sense, and how to approach AI like an artist (not just vibe with it). If you’ve ever looked at a work and thought “ok but… what am I looking at?” — this is your entry point.

Meetup members

Li Zhenhua

@bjartlab

!Mediengruppe Bitnik

@mediengruppe_bitnik

1 / 3

Uncover With Art

Through Uncover With Art, an educational documentary series by CIFRA TV, CIFRA’s in-house video production, we explore the key themes of each season through contemporary art. Using artworks and artistic practices as points of departure, each episode examines broader cultural, social, and technological questions, revealing how art can offer new ways of understanding the world around us.

FAKE: The Word That Existed Long Before the Internet | Uncover With Art

Mockumentary | Uncover With Art

How Artists Use Deepfakes in Digital Art | Uncover With Art

CIFRA TV

What happens when memory becomes data, machines become storytellers, and technology becomes infrastructure? CIFRA TV explored these questions through conversations with experts from art and technology

12:10

Unpacking: Solar Prospects with Vanina Saracino

Interview

CIFRA TV