24:04 min

Courtesy the artists and Apalazzo Gallery

The Frankfurter Kunstverein is premiering Eva & Franco Mattes’ new video work, Up Next. This piece takes as its subject the fate of Fatemeh Khishvand (*2001, Tehran, Iran), who became known as Sahar Tabar on Instagram. Her story turned into a phenomenon of internet culture. The case of Fatemeh Khishvand touches on many themes that Eva & Franco Mattes explore in their work: visibility, misinformation, the dissemination of images, meme culture, virality, exploitation and manipulation.

Since 2019, the artist duo has been following the case of the Iranian social media celebrity and archiving thousands of related photos and articles. For the video slideshow, which is conceived entirely without sound, the artists have selected a hundred images: Tabar’s selfie photos alternate with unverified quotes from articles about the blogger, primarily clickbait articles that have spread mostly derogatory, contradictory, and at times false information about the Instagrammer.

In between the individual images, the artist duo inserts black frames, empty pauses. These are meant to give viewers time to reflect on the veracity of what they have seen. This stylistic device breaks with the speed of the mode on Instagram that sets the time limit for Stories and Reels. These may not exceed a maximum duration of 15 and 90 seconds respectively and are continuously played back without interruption. This is all part of a strategy inherent to social media. It was designed to generate neural reactions resembling addiction, triggered by the constant flow of new visual stimuli. This phenomenon is part of the so-called attention economy prevailing in the social media world and has permanently changed our viewing habits.

During peak periods, up to 486,000 people followed Tabar’s Instagram profile. She posted selfies showing herself with exaggerated lips, a pointed, snub nose, pale skin, brightly coloured hair, dark circles around her eyes and bony arms and legs. The resulting aesthetic drew similarities to costumes, zombies, or animated characters, such as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005).

Although the blogger mainly simulated this aesthetic by means of makeup, Photoshop, and filters, she was accused of using lip fillers, liposuction and rhinoplasty by the clickbait press and internet public. This led to a wave of outrage and scandalisation. These speculations were backed up by the citing of dubious sources.

Tabar’s profile garnered significant attention, especially when online gossip sites pointed out her resemblance to actress Angelina Jolie, dubbing her ‘Zombie Angelina Jolie’. They even claimed that she underwent up to 50 medical procedures to resemble the actress. This was just one of the many confusing statements that online tabloids posted, which then went viral.

Many of the media outlets reporting on the case never questioned whether it could be a parody and so a media hoax. Rather than discussing the plausibility of the case itself, the tabloid public became indignant over the young woman. It was precisely this outrage, surprise and uncritical attitude on the part of the online audience that turned Tabar into a global phenomenon.

What can be symbolically observed in this case is the power of misinterpretation and fake news as fuel for an online economy of excitement and scandalisation. Tabar herself declared her appearances as online selfie performances in the tradition of Cindy Sherman.

The staging of fictional identities is a recurring element in art. Cindy Sherman, for example, assumed the appearance of mostly female characters in her works from the 1970s to the early 2000s by arranging clothing, hairstyles and different visual contexts. On her current Instagram account, Sherman posts self-portraits that take the alterations of reality through modern filters to extremes. Younger artists, too, such as Amalia Ullman, have invented fictional identities on Instagram, confusing and entertaining an online audience in equal measure.

Historically, playing with pseudonyms has a long tradition: artists like Marcel Duchamp, whose alter ego was called Rrose Sélavy, Lynn Hershman Leeson with numerous fictional personalities, as well as Eva & Franco Mattes with the invented artist Darko Maver in 1998. His fictional life and works spread through the media and the art world. Maver’s career reached its media peak in 1999 with his invitation to the 48^th Venice Biennale. Later, the artist duo declared publicly that both Maver’s life and his works were invented.

In their modern and contemporary form, these staged performances have developed into collective online performances in which millions of people participate every day on Instagram, in the form of photos and reels, stories and selfies, make-up tutorials and ‘outfits of the day’.

The media phenomenon surrounding the figure of Tabar led to a dramatic turn of events in real life. On October 22, 2019, the Iranian news agency Tasmin reported that Fatemeh Khishwand had been officially charged and arrested in Tehran on charges of ‘blasphemy, incitement to violence, illegal acquisition of property, violation of the national dress code and encouraging young people to corruption’.

This is not an isolated case. Since 2016, Iranian female influencers have been increasingly arrested for their online activities.

At the time of Khishwand’s arrest, Instagram was still permitted as a social media platform in Iran. Twitter and Facebook were already blocked by the government. However, anonymity and freedom of speech were not guaranteed on Instagram either. Given the current backdrop in Iran and the protests for women’s rights, Tabar’s story has gained in importance in the context of the significance of social media channels. From the Arab Spring onwards, these channels have played a central role in enabling civil disobedience, the networking of protesters and the dissemination of independent news.

Since 2011, social media has provided the opportunity for an open-source investigation that aims to document and denounce human rights violations. In autocratic states, such investigations are observed, restricted or blocked. At the same time, the Iranian government has learned how to use social media to its advantage, transforming it from a tool of information to one of disinformation, control, surveillance, and political manipulation – a means of restricting freedom. Sahar Tabar’s Instagram account was deleted at the time of her arrest. While her online persona remains visible, it is overshadowed and unrecognisable due to numerous fake news and fake profiles superimposed upon it.

Why do Eva & Franco Mattes take on this phenomenon? The two artists repeatedly raise broader questions about the authenticity of images and information, the staging and ambivalence that prevail in the digital sphere. The overarching theme is the manipulation of identity online and the way these fakes feed back into real-life society. Digital and analogue communication today form a single unit, indivisible and interwoven.

BEFNOED is the title of an ongoing series of videos that Eva & Franco Mattes have been producing since 2013. These short films are published online, on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world, in Cambodia, Russia, China or Pakistan, without comment and without reference to any art project: places where the works are meant to be found almost by chance.

The videos show people carrying out seemingly meaningless actions that they have received as instructions from the artistic duo. Eva & Franco Mattes have hired these performers anonymously via online marketplaces for digital services, so-called crowdsourcing platforms. The people film themselves without knowing who the instructions come from, which audience the films are intended for or what goals are to be pursued with them. Different workers interpret the same performance with slight variations: a military salute with a bucket on one’s head, standing on a ladder, licking a car rim, two people connecting their heads through a tube.

For the exhibition, these films are spatially staged in such a way that the viewers, if they want to see the works, also have to perform a physical act that contradicts behaviour normally found in museum spaces.

The visitors have to lie on the floor under a monitor tent or lift each other up in order to look at one of the monitors that points to the ceiling above their heads. If they wish to see the images, they are obliged to squeeze between the monitor and the wall. This creates a physical interaction with the artwork that reveals a correlation between the unaware performers on the net and the unaware performers in the room. In the same way that the digitally recruited workers bow to a request from the artists, so too the visitors must adapt their behaviour to the artwork. Both actions, the digital and the analogue, celebrate absurdity, which at some points can bring to mind Erwin Wurm’s Living Sculptures. ‘We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us’ (Marshall McLuhan). The repetition of externally determined actions online is a highly common and successful practice, upon which the platform TikTok, for example, has built an entire business model.

As with numerous other works by the artistic duo, BEFNOED also works with irony, whereby the user’s behaviour in front of and behind the screen is humorously caricatured.

Eva & Franco Mattes address the mechanisms of labour in the digital world, which trade workforce as a commodity on an internationally digital labour market. The title BEFNOED is an acronym for ‘By everyone, for no one, every day’. Thus, the central question in this video series concerns gig workers, the people in the crowdsourcing economy, their work, authorship and individuality. Someone on the other side of the screen is fulfilling our requests, whether they be clicks, likes, online shopping. An action that seems immaterial to us has a direct impact on someone’s work on the other side of the world.

Crowdsourcing platforms function as anonymous marketplaces for employees and employers looking for short-term jobs for HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). This concerns all services that can be outsourced online and are summarised by the term ‘human as a service’.

So-called contractors are often interposed between the employee and the employer for the purpose of ensuring the latter anonymity. The advantage of this work model is that it represents a quick and easy way to earn money flexibly. The disadvantage is the risk that workers’ rights and non-wage labour costs are circumvented. As a Facebook content moderator aptly describes in Eva & Franco Mattes’ work The Bots, it creates ‘a digital proletariat and a digital factory that produces no concrete products and is driven by profit alone’.

The first crowdsourcing platform for micro-labour (gigs), Mechanical Turk, was set up by Amazon in 2005. This marked the beginning of an increasingly deregulated labour market or labour pool. Mechanical Turk is the best-known and largest example of a platform where micro-tasks that cannot (yet) be performed using computing power are commissioned at low cost. There is a sense that this is a transitional period in which humans are still doing these kinds of jobs until they are taken over by algorithms. An important point is that it is still much more profitable to exploit low-paid human labour than to pay engineers to develop software. According to estimates, the turks’ average wage is around 2 dollars per hour. The micro work offered is often remunerated with credits on Amazon accounts – thus representing a double profit for the platform. Mechanical Turk was followed by numerous other crowdsourcing platforms such as Clickworker or Appjobber.

The original Mechanical Turk (1770) was a seemingly ground-breaking invention: a chess playing machine commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Externally, it resembled the other automata of the time. The machine could imitate the movements of a human playing chess, but a person was hiding inside it. For almost a century, the trick led viewers to believe that a machine could play chess. So the name of the Mechanical Turk platform is intended to suggest something that feels like a machine but has humans behind it. Humans work to fill the gaps of algorithms while training the latter to do a better job in future. For this reason, their work serving algorithms is less and less considered actual work and takes place invisibly in the background. The work BEFNOED provides visibility to these otherwise invisible workers, allowing them to engage in creative actions that are sometimes humorous and occasionally even poetic.