Now on view
Ivana vladislava
Digital Hybris
25 January – 08 February 2025
Robert Grunenberg is delighted to present the exhibition “Digital Hybris” by Ivana Vladislava
IVANA VLADISLAVA
Digital Hybris
Robert Grunenberg
25.01.2025 – 08.02.2025
Ivana Vladislava: Digital Hybris
“Deconstructing Good Taste” is the only statement on Ivana Vladislava’s Instagram profile. It could also be used to describe the strategies she employs across various cultural fields that have established her as a subversive icon in the fashion and club scene, on social media, as a trans activist, performer, and muse.
With her first exhibition, Digital Hybris, at Robert Grunenberg, she makes her debut in the art world with a room-filling installation and a series of new works. Digital Hybris is the first of a two-part exhibition series, the second of which will be Digital Nemesis. Vladislava, who in a conversation with Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg for Interview Magazine said that her life was “something between performance art and social experiment” and that after countless facelifts she was “like a Picasso, expensive and deformed,” approaches the “it-girl” system in her latest project.
Full of sarcasm and humor, her works describe a media cycle that includes hybris — the rise, the delusions, and the loss of reality — and nemesis — the poetic justice, the revenge, in which society mercilessly dismantles the inflated, media-constructed image of the icon. At the same time, it is about the deconstruction of social projections onto female and trans bodies. Vladislava mercilessly exposes stereotypes such as the over-mother, the pornographic sex object, by exaggerating herself into an absolute, totally artificial, almost alien-like object. “I think we all objectify ourselves at some point,” she tells Uddenberg, “because to be an object is to have no feelings, which makes you emotionally unassailable. It is the ultimate form of perfection, because perfection is artificial. Like a doll.”
Vladislava, who is now featured in campaigns by designers like Glenn Martens (Diesel) or walks the catwalk for Guram Gvasalia (Vetements) in Paris, was born in Poland, on the Ukrainian border. Her performative and digital self-portrayal is informed by the economic collapse of the Eastern Bloc and her upbringing in the post-communism of the 1990s. Her style is inspired by the precarious, yet highly exhibitionist and experimental aesthetics of this era, in which capitalist desires for wealth, luxury, fashion, and celebrity culture collided with material hardship and social instability.
Western influences such as the cult of fashion and sports brands, hip hop, drugs, techno, reality TV, girl power, pornography, and the image of teenage pop stars like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera found their own grimmer, more precarious, more rebellious equivalents in the former Eastern Bloc. Due to a lack of resources and often repressive, religious social structures, anything and everything was used to develop a unique, ‘maximalist’ look. At the same time, there was a tendency in the culture towards the bizarre, the nouveau riche, the deliberately tasteless, and the ostentatious. This included the representation of luxury and eroticism in all available garments, from lingerie to low-cut tube dresses, regardless of whether they went together.
Similar trends could be seen in design, with rundown wooden houses painted neon pink and walls covered in leopard print.
Long before this edgy, raw, improvised style found its way into the fashion industry, it was being cultivated by Vladislava. She began publishing her digital Photoshop collages with self-staging, as she says, “back in the Stone Age of the Internet.” She deliberately aimed for an amateur, low-tech look, an absurd combination of precariousness, glamour, and social tristesse. At the same time, her strategy is to achieve maximum effect with the most economical means. She achieved this in 2024 with a reel on Instagram in which she plays the role of a naive Eastern Bloc housewife giving a tour of her freshly refurbished fitted kitchen, in which she has covered the entire room — kitchen cabinets, sink, stove, and every detail — in leopard print, the epitome of seductive luxury. The post went viral as a targeted “rage bait,” liked and hated by over 58 million people. It sparked a veritable phenomenon in mass culture, where leopard print was reimagined, remixed, and celebrated in countless designs and styles.
Using the same pattern, Vladislava covers Robert Grunenberg’s gallery space, transforming the clean white cube into a shimmering all-over, a sexy and abstract hell that completely overwhelms the eye. The gallery is transformed into a kind of stage or concept store display.
In this obsessive, perfectionist environment, Vladislava shows her digitally mounted self-portraits, which she prints on various materials and fabrics. The works are draped, stretched, or hung in the space in improvised constellations, intuitively and spontaneously, in contrast to the environment. In her pictures, Vladislava stages herself in situations that are as glamorous as they are precarious, in an opulent and cheap Eastern Bloc chic that is like surreal hardcore: rolled up in old Persian carpets, lying in jars of fat, plump cucumbers, between dirty feet and sterile table decorations, with weapons, cakes, stretch dresses, cigarette butts, and flower arrangements.
Vladislava refrains from references to art history or “artistic” ambitions. In her exhibition, she tends to refer to political, feminist issues, her own background, and class issues. She develops a digital practice in which images, memes, and snapshots are “thrown” onto the Internet without context or theoretical superstructure and drift in the algorithmic stream of images. If there is such a thing as a theme, it is her digital staging and self-representation.
Vladislava’s world is completely commodified. Her body is a prime example of a commodity that can be found in a 1-euro store or a high-end boutique, an object that can be fetishized, copied, exploited, loved like a mother, abandoned or thrown away, or presented on a Paris catwalk. But it is precisely in this absolute availability, which Vladislava chooses freely and experimentally, that she finds resilience, resistance, beauty, and criticism.
Opening
25 January 2025
6 – 9 PM
Exhibition on view
25.01.2025 – 08.02.2025
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com
This exhibition is supported by