Alfatih
If such a thing as signifying a removal is possible, Alfatih definitely strikes a remarkably elusive figure in the Swiss media art scene, or any other “scene” for that matter. Biographical information and artist statement are kept voluntarily scant, posing a sweet but stubborn refusal to play along that reflects his take on contemporary digital technology.
Emerging from - or dissolving into - seemingly mundane environments and props of daily life, Alfatih’s works lead us to characters we consider pre-verbal, human figures at an early stage of both freedom and dependency. Leaving the viewer in between double mirrors or at the helm of household utensils that signify a civilization of control, Alfatih leaves one in an ambivalent state with regards to these potentially innocent beings. We are both in a position of exerting the aforementioned control, and of submitting to the first ebbs and flows of a narrative with no human author in sight.
A Day in the Life, a commissioned CGI animation film that shows a day in the life of a “grown-up baby”, constituted Alfatih’s first U.S. solo show at Swiss Institute in New York in 2023. In it, a 24-hours narrative scripted by AI unfolds, steered by prompts from the artist and scored by musician and theorist Tapiwa Svosve. As the day unfolds and the baby performs adult rituals marked by time stamps and seems to seek approval from its watches, the quiet melancholy of a solitary, repetitive life quietly seeps through the fabric of time and language.
In A Way Out of Time (2024), shown as part of the 2024 edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, visitors take the reins of Victorian-style pram and, it is implied, of the infant being it supposedly carries. Movement across the gallery floor and institutional landscape, however, only activates a real-time artificial narrative, a ChatGPT-aided dérive through a desolate, AI-rendered landscape. As ritual movement is impressed upon the machine, viewers push the AI spawn and help it “plug the void with artificial memories” (Alice Bucknell in Mousse, February 2024).