Digital Amalgamations

As the World Wide Web evolves towards the Web 3.0 age, digital media such as video games, apps, and the internet have spawned their own forms of culture and means of self-expression. The exhibition Digital Amalgamations brings together artists Skawennati, Sondi, Shaheer Zazai, Ryker Woodward, and LuYang to highlight how each artist's practice is in conversation with the digital landscapes they portray in relation to markers of their own identity, such as race, gender, age, and situatedness.

Human existence within a multitude of digital cyberspaces has blurred the separation between “artificial” reality and physical reality. As discussed in Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, we are now, and have always been cyborgs – evolved to become bodies beyond flesh: avatars of ourselves. All five artists in Digital Amalgamations explore and re-think what it means to exist within contemporary time and space: introducing new modes of creating and experiencing art of various mediums, while questioning: how do we exist as humans within digital cyberspaces, and within our highly digitized times? How is the creation of art affected under various socio-political conditions?

As such, a re-analysis of how we exist within our contemporary digitized condition is in order, and to question what it even means to be a body within the current time. Digital Amalgamations sets out to showcase diverse viewpoints on how artists, under contemporary social and technological conditions, express formations of their identity: exploring the multiplicities, (re)imaginings, temporalities, and fluidities of the self. Visitors are invited to evaluate their own relationships with, and reliance on digital technologies, as well as question their preconceived notions of what digital art, and digital art histories, can look like.

About

Skawennati

Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others.

Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-founded and co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University, where she received her BFA. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.

Sondi

Sondi (she/her) is a new media artist from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands. Her work is deeply rooted in her identity as a person of the diaspora and serves as a conduit to unravel the intricate and intimate layers of identity, belonging, ownership, and heritage. Her artistic process centers around worldbuilding, drawing inspiration from Black science fiction and visionary fiction writers to create virtual environments where memory, ancestry, and imagination come into being. In these virtual dreamscapes, she explores new modes of being, using the power of radical imagination.

Sondi builds worlds primarily through immersive 3D videos engineered with game engines that continuously navigate between virtual and physical spaces to investigate the intersection of technology and culture. By examining how popular media constructs and disseminates images and ideas, her work challenges dominant cultural narratives that shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. Her body of work reflects on the interplay between our corporeal, spiritual, and digital selves and spans a diverse range of mediums, including game design, audiovisual performance, theater, music, film, and education.

Her work and collaborations have been exhibited at museums, galleries and media art festivals such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Dutch Design Week (NL), Brakke Grond Amsterdam (NL), Nieuw Instituut Rotterdam (NL), Museum Arnhem (NL), Kunshal KAdE Amersfoort (NL), Schauspielhaus Zurich (CH) and ACUD Gallery Berlin (DE)

Shaheer Zazai

Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. Zazai received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist in residence at OCAD University as part of the Digital Painting Atelier in 2015.

Zazai’s practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora. The digital works revolve around Microsoft Word and imagery reminiscent of traditional Afghan carpets. Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own designs in Microsoft Word, where every knot of a carpet is translated into a typed character. While the digital is a process based exploration, the paintings have been an internal investigation into vulnerability and fear.

Over the years Zazai’s material vocabulary has expanded into textile work, site-specific public art installations and video works with his lens becoming self-reflective. Some of his recent notable exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, Latcham Art Centre, Patel Brown Gallery, Owens Art Gallery. Zazai is currently part of a group exhibition at Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Zealand and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Art Gallery of Mississauga opening in January 2026.

Ryker Woodward

Ryker Woodward (born in 1998, in San Diego, California) currently lives and works in Monterey, California.
Ryker moved to Portland, Oregon in 2017, to attain an BFA in Painting and drawing from the Pacific Northwest College of Art where he graduated from in 2022.

LuYang

Lu Yang is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist based in Tokyo and Shanghai. His work, deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy, explores themes of life, technology, and spirituality. Among his many notable works, the recent series "DOKUSHODOKUSHI" uses his digital persona to address contemporary human issues and aims to spread Buddhist wisdom. Lu Yang extensively utilizes computer graphics (CG) technology and game engines as creative media, collaborating with experts from various fields such as scientists, psychologists, designers, and music producers.

His recent solo museum exhibitions include the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, the Mudec Museum in Milan, the Kunsthalle Basel Museum in Switzerland, the Palais Populaire in Berlin, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museumin Denmark, the Kunstpalais Museum in Erlangen, and MOCA Cleveland in the USA. He participated in the Venice Biennale in both 2015 and 2022 and has been involved in other major museum exhibitions and biennials/triennials. Lu Yang was awarded the BMW Art Journey in 2019 and was also the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award in 2022.

Anna Be

Anna Be is a second year candidate in the Master of Art History in Critical and Curatorial Studies program at UBC, where she also received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art. Anna’s curatorial research is focused on learning about how artist practices are informed by their personal interactions with digital cyberspaces and technology. She is also interested in exploring and re-thinking how art, especially new media art, is curated, displayed, viewed, accessed, and circulated. Currently, she works and resides in British Columbia, throughout the unceded ancestral and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Peoples.

This exhibition is presented with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.

Related texts

Synergistic Practices: On "Digital Amalgamations:

Anna Be, Guest Curator

“Digital Amalgamations” showcases the importance of the human being behind the technology used to create artworks and how humanity is both affected by, and affects, digital worlds. This exhibition brings together artists Skawennati, Sondi, Shaheer Zazai, Ryker Woodward, and LuYang and sets out to explore how each artist's practice is in conversation with the digital landscapes they portray in relation to markers of their own identity, such as race, gender, age, and situatedness within a post-internet world.

We are all living under a universal notion of existence that Erich Hörl terms the “technological condition”[1]. We have become digital beings that have integrated ourselves into technology, and the technological realm is – known or unbeknownst to us – the framework we operate under. Our existence in countless digital cyberspaces, such as on games, apps, and websites, have blurred the separation between “artificial” reality and physical reality. Thus, we now live in what we might call a "transpacial universe," where we exist and present ourselves as hybrid, plural, and fragmented beings.

The physicality of the artist merges with their digital existences in their artworks, resulting in both a separation, yet also an intertwining, or an amalgamation, between the digital and physical body. The artists in “Digital Amalgamations” showcase this integration and symbiotic relationship between the human and the digital, exploring the multiplicities, (re)imaginings, temporalities, and fluidities of the self.

Home404 by Sondi is a three-channel installation that questions what it means to lack a fixed home while simultaneously occupying multiple spaces. The whole installation adapts to its immediate environment, and allows itself to always expand, adapt, and garner various meanings and interpretations based on their surroundings.

Sondi’s identity as an artist of diaspora is presented in both her depiction of her avatar (that shares Sondi’s physical likeness) and her creation of engulfing fantastical landscapes. Referring to local rituals in Cameroon, her avatar in Home404 is replicated throughout three television screens that make up the installation. Her practice centers around the concept of worldbuilding: creating virtual environments where her memory, ancestry, and imagination enter to contemplate new modes and intricacies of being. Cultural histories and memories of the past intertwine with Sondi’s present, and are all memorialized within digital code.

Highlighting Indigenous people in the future, Skawennati’s artistic practice questions human relationships with technology through her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. A significant portion of her artistic practice has revolved around the online massive multiplayer community called Second Life, originally released in 2003.

Skawennati’s Dancing with Myself is a life size diptych that pairs a photo of the artist with a “machinimagraph”[2] of her Second Life avatar, xox, taking on the form of fashion photography. She questions: what aspects make an avatar Indigenous? How can she work with, and against software limitations in order to represent herself as a Native woman?

The avatar body, as Treva Michelle Pullen states, “can be used as a fluid and malleable site for the decolonization of Indigenous and other marginalized identities”[3]. However, this avatar identity is not to be alienated from physical land, body, and space [4].

Ryker Woodward’s paintings of video game characters and interfaces always allude to the gaming subject, or the self, who witnesses these gaming landscapes – either through the representation of gaming protagonists, environments, user interface graphics that provide information, or the deliberate presence-absence of the physical controller apparatus. Brendan Keogh, in “A Play of Bodies,” states that the body-at-the-videogame is a particular, augmented version of the player’s body: “[...]identities, abilities, literacies, and perspectives are taken up and put aside [...]” [5]. In this way, the player and video game take on an equal status of hierarchy to one another. Becoming intrinsically intertwined, they work together to present a formation of a body – an avatar.

In Woodward’s paintings, these avatars are characters from nostalgic game releases, rather than direct representations of himself. These avatars, in turn, stand as signals of all of us within the game.

DOKU the Self by LuYang is a video that showcases the multiplicities, disintegrations, and ambiguities of the artist, as well as his ongoing exploration in uncovering the potentialities and limitations of being human – informed by a cosmology of his Buddhist practices, Japanese popular culture, science, and religion. His genderless avatar, called DOKU, is short for the Japanese phrase “Dokusho dokushi”, which means: we are born alone, and we die alone. The phrase references the Infinite Life Sutra Buddhist scripture from the Great Vehicle tradition, a sutra that references a cosmology of realms of rebirth and transmigration. LuYang’s creation and emphasis on his avatar within this work is also evocative of the word’s origins within Hindu incarnation. DOKU is a digital shell for the artist, who acts as a perpetually reincarnated version of himself that houses his soul within the digital realm.

Representation of the digitally intertwined self is seen even beyond the representation of a human body. Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto-based, Afghan-Canadian artist whose digital carpets created in Microsoft Excel and Word are always floating between transmediation, taking on the form of being viewed on a digital screen display, to existing in various digital formats, and also existing within the physical modes of print, vinyl, or carpets in collaboration with weavers from Afghanistan. MBTC N1 (2018) showcases only one of the physical forms Zazai’s practice can undertake - and also exists as a carpet outside of the gallery space.

Shaheer Zazai’s artistic practice showcases translations of this form of data between multiple realms and people – crossing cultural, and digital/physical boundaries. His practice can be seen as a representation of the self through culture, and within deeply meaningful cultural items – such as carpets – that hold their own rich cosmologies and forms of storytelling.

All of the artworks in “Digital Amalgamations” present varied perspectives on how digital apparatuses have opened deeper understanding of the self, showcasing the complex nuances of what it means to be human within a digitized time. “Digital Amalgamations” invites viewers to evaluate their own relationships and reliance on digital technologies, as well as question preconceived notions of what digital art, and digital art histories, can look like. This exhibition hopes to re-evaluate what being digital even means, beyond the digital screen. Experiencing and engaging with digital technologies as human beings is what gives digital technologies meaning. Like all art, digital adjacent art cannot be experienced or created in a vacuum – it is backed by networks of human communication, interaction, and sharing of knowledge.

1. Erich Hörl, “The Technological Condition,” Parrhesia, no. 22 (2015): 6.

2. Skawennati, “She Falls For Ages,” accessed April 11, 2025, https://skawennati.com/legacy/SheFallsForAges/index.html. In 2016, Skawennati coined the term “machinimagraph”: a still image that was made from a machinima (a style of animation created inside video game graphic engines).

3. Treva Michelle Pullen, “Skawennati’s Timetraveller™ Deconstructing the Colonial Matrix in Virtual Reality,” AlterNative An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 12 no. 3 (2016): 244, DOI:10.20507/AlterNative.2016.12.3.3.

4. David Gaertner, “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): 59.

5. Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (The MIT Press, 2018), 22, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10963.001.0001.

Access gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the following funders as well as our committed family of donors, members, and volunteers, for enabling this organization to remain vigorous and connected to the communities we support.

With gratitude as guests, Access is located on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Digital Amalgamations

Skawennati, Sondi, Shaheer Zazai, Ryker Woodward, LuYang

Curated by Anna Be