[Ana Viktoria Dzinic]
Text 2543/Image 6
234876—23 LDN
RENDER TO REALITY
Ana Viktoria Dzinic sees the world as image. It’s obvious in her work—where the mundane is never boring, our bodies are brands, and filters reinscribe reality. But it’s also apparent within five minutes of meeting her. The prolific artist and self-described image hoarder is sitting in her London-based studio, speaking into a video call. She’s talking excitedly about a notoriously chaotic fashion outlet.
(*´ー`)
“I just love TK Maxx”, she says.
(*≧m≦)
“You know how in every single luxury house, they’re like ‘oh, we want to curate this retail environment?’, I find that super annoying because I see all the static. Why did they choose this carpet? This designer? I’m semiotically shopping. I’m already overwhelmed. But when I go to TK Maxx, it’s all crumbling and it’s so badly designed, that I kind of forget the design. It almost doesn’t feel as capitalist. It just looks like a jumble of shit. It’s like illegal downloading. TK Maxx makes me think of the internet”.
ヽ|・ω・|ゞ
“It’s like using LimeWire to download an old album, and there being endless popups, and downloading completely wrong”, I offered.
(´ー`) ｡• · •｡.｡• · •｡.
“Yeah”, she responds, “it’s genius, everything feels visually intense. It looks like a jumble of AI images. It’s kind of how I see the world: everything is a representation model of something”.
(´0ﾉ｀*)
A store that functions as a backend for capitalist sludge feels like an accurate model for our moment. It represents a time that feels increasingly intense, thoughtless and unstable. A mixture of horrors, euphoria, hatred, atrocities and unreality springs up at us at any moment. Burgundy and yellow jumpers from Raf Simons’ Calvin Klein era lie limply between bacon-scented candles. Jil Sander boots have been slung across the floor and now rest beneath a shelf of Himalayan salt and ceramic gnomes. Everything is glitching; luxury doesn’t exist; Celine is Shein, Prada is Primark—the world is TK Maxxing.
(*゜ー゜)
In our increasingly digitised, incoherent, pre-metaverse moment—what Daniel Felstead recently labelled janky capitalism—Dzinic has built a reputation for precisely dissecting post-internet image circulation and its trajectories, pitfalls, and semiotics, mostly through installations and photographic paintings. We met following her debut solo exhibition in the UK, Repetitive, which ran from March to June 2024 at Nicoletti Contemporary. True to its name, Repetitive continued two installations Dzinic had already produced: Even the most critical bees stop and smell the roses and Propaganda and Decoration, both from 2022. The previous exhibitions were repurposed and resized, produced at scales of 1:10, 1:15, and life size, and arranged in maquettes, scaled-down models of Nicoletti’s gallery space.
(;¬_¬)
The walls were lined with a series of photographic paintings printed on velvet, featuring black and white vector patterns created using a filter that first appeared on the original iPhone in 2007. The objects and prints scuff conventional notions of taste: they’re girlish, generic and intimate. There’s bad graffiti, flowers by the roadside in Hackney, a discount sign on Oxford Street, a Pret A Manger napkin drenched in black paint. An MP3 player, also from before 2007, lies in the middle of the room, cycling through 25 piano covers of pop songs. The entire installation feels quotidian, but pointedly biographical. A Balenciaga bag, the fashion house Dzinic once consulted for, is graffitied in all caps with an affirmation, YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL. Her first camera, a Canon, is printed three times on one canvas, 15 times on another. It’s everything a working-class German girl, growing up in Switzerland, needed to represent herself.
(｀ω´*)
Dzinic says the 2007 cut-off is specific to the iPhone. “I think the moment the iPhone was introduced, all other technology became obsolete”, she explains, “because it has multi-touch user functions. The moment you put a phone there, it has too many other connotations”. An image from Propaganda and Decoration distilled this distinction, a single picture of her Canon, simply titled, ‘This is not a smartphone’. It marks a turning point in our image-making habits, where we began uploading images en masse to an ephemeral, hard-to-trace archive of online activity. Dean Kissick described 2007 as the moment we moved from the financial economy to the attention economy, a time when the old celebrity culture died and gave way to the new—when Britney shaved her head, Keeping Up with the Kardashians started streaming, and our lives became oriented around online attention. Where text began to lose its basis as a fixer of reality and gave way to the images we negotiate, filter, and upload.
(・｀ω´・)
“It’s important anthropomorphic positioning”, Dzinic says. “The digi cam isn’t professional. It’s the kind of camera everyone uses; it’s less systematic and abstract. This matters to me. I only care about humans and how humans misuse things”. To pull apart processes of circulation, Dzinic draws on Stewart Brand’s concept of pace layering to highlight the different speeds at which images, and layers of culture more broadly, evolve. She describes a new development in our current mode of janky capitalism, where these layers have accelerated to the point of being ‘so-fast-it-becomes-impossible-to-track’, making it difficult to trace cultural origins or predict how or why something might go viral.
(#^。^#)
This speed creates an attention economy that requires new extremes to make memorable images, a phenomenon Dzinic is fascinated by. “It’s clout maximisation”, she says, “maximum clout for minimum effort”. The Covid-19 pandemic saw a rise in what Gunseli Yalcinkaya called schizoposting—a rush of uploading anything and everything: unintelligible meme dumps, text walls and other formless methods of communicating. Pharrell Williams’ face is keeping the wheel turning at Louis Vuitton. The British monarchy is in the midst of a bizarre, cryptic rebrand, with a demonic impasto portrait at its centre. Harmony Korine is releasing senseless films with gamertag-style titles that play like watching cutscenes from a video game, “even if you haven’t seen it, you feel like you have”, Dzinic notes. What was once Balenciaga’s atelier for distressing is now Jordanluca’s piss jeans or Luka Sabbat’s spunk cap, which Dzinic compares to Amalia Ulman’s cum-splattered paparazzi portrait, a climax of ever-increasingly abstract commodity fetishism.
( *´エ`*)
“I’m intrigued by the archiving of this”, Dzinic says, “how would you archive MSCHF’s red boots, the cum hat, new forms of distressing, or lo-fi Instagrams. It all moves so fast. I wonder whether only text, or people talking, is the only way to archive the concept of the fictional image itself. When Lucio Fontana cuts his canvases, it feels familiar, it feels like we’ve been there, but only through constant documentation. It has to be worthy”. She pauses. “I’m intrigued by the matrix of where stories become worthy of being mythologised”.
osis of authenticity”, an “intense repetitive thought in which people struggle between the real and the fake—perhaps something they hate but simultaneously love”. In Repetitive, the canvases mirror this neurosis, both with her signature use of repetition and stacking, and because they’re simultaneously photographs, paintings, prints, and fabric. “The sterile fabric works alongside these lo-fi, terrible copies of copies, yet they still carry the same representation”, she notes. They reflect the dizzying, layered effect of an interconnected system of infrastructure and devices, requiring us to consider the kinds of dynamics these oppositions create.
ヽ（｀д´#）ノ
“Is it authentic or not? Who cares? It’s good narrative”, she continues. “People say, embrace the traditional, reject the contemporary. But I love the contemporary, this janky world, I like to thrive in it”. By repeating and repurposing her media devices and past exhibitions, Dzinic challenges what is or is not authentic at its core, tapping into an age-old argument about the indexical nature of images.
｡• · •｡.｡• · •｡. (￣д￣)
Where the traditionally indexical image supposes to be a direct imprint of the world, Dzinic’s cutting, pasting, and filtering eludes indexicality in favour of style—style as in form, style for style’s sake. “Style just as a style, it doesn’t matter that it’s graffiti, it doesn’t matter that it’s heavily filtered. The first time we all made an image speak to us was when we switched it to black and white. It made us feel less ugly, edgier, cooler, more serious. It’s very banal, but these moments are the lowest common denominator of media agency. They give us agency over a media item”.
(≧∇≦)
These applications create indexical marks—fingerprints over the original image which reinscribe indexicality to the moment the filter was applied, or the image was reprinted. It echoes an argument Isabella Graw made in 2015, in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh for Texte zur Kunst..., that indexicality could be better understood as index effects; images that contain traces of life, owed to the objective automatism of the technical apparatus and triggered by the photographer. But Dzinic shows how these traces of life are bleeding into our reality, through our image-making behaviour. “We live in glass houses”, she reflects. “But I also think people live in glass houses without anyone watching. I observe my own patterns, and I feel like that phenomenon is very much of this world. It’s understanding ourselves as an image”.
ヽ(･ω･´“)
As Dzinic displayed in her 2023 photo-painting series, Image, Affect, Syntax, which mimicked a carefully curated Instagram grid, maybe these aren’t just image effects; they’re image affects. We’re losing grip on where the grid ends and reality begins. Images are no longer taken; they’re generated. Reality isn’t recorded; it’s prompted. Our images don’t just express the self—they are the self. The question is: what does it mean to inhabit this image-world? Dzinic decodes a solution, listening to images intently, filtering, re-making, and revelling in each iteration, folding new affective qualities into memories of intimate encounters, bare bodies, stretch marks, flowers, clothes.
σ(`∇´“)
Dzinic depicts the sticky beauty of this practice, but she also gestures to the control exercised over our means of representation. Repetitive featured a photograph of tangled LED sunglasses backstage at the Balenciaga summer 2020 runway, an image that was owned by the brand but has now moved into Dzinic’s ownership. The paint used throughout Repetitive was Black 3.0, Stuart Semple’s ‘blackest black’, which was designed to democratise vantablack, the colour Anish Kapoor controversially bought the rights to in 2016. “I’m not interested in the blackest black as an aesthetic tool”, Dzinic explains. “I like the background of it more, the appropriation part, it’s like Semple is the TK Maxx of paint. I was very intrigued by the idea of bootlegging a colour or media scheme”.
(* _ω_)
As McKenzie Wark described in her 2015 essay ‘The Vectoralist Class’, capital, labour, energy and goods have vaporised into a new, more gaseous state: vectors of information that want to be free but find themselves in chains. The more we become entangled with our devices, the more control can be exercised by our all-powerful Web3 overlords; the more our data is mined, our habits manipulated, our voices imitated, our ideas repurposed. “They don’t just produce information, they want the rights to it”, Dzinic says. “Images get commissioned, essays get commissioned, and then, in ten years, Natasha Stagg will do something that makes it her own, just with annotations that reference it was originally paid for by Gucci or Chanel. We don’t even know if that’s always true, but it moves into her ownership. It becomes her autofiction”.
(*｡ω｡*)
In Repetitive, ‘For Tracey’ and ‘Wasser’ are two smaller canvases, black and white prints of the ocean in Margate, in an homage to Tracey Emin. “What Richard Prince did for image making in the 70s, Tracey Emin did for autofiction, narrative structure, self-image, main character journeys, all the things we think are natural today”, Dzinic observes. “She was the queen of perceiving herself as an image and making the most intense biographical works and being like, I am the art! I mean, supposedly she’s a Tory now, or whatever. I mean, awful, but I kind of love that she’s hated. Maybe I’m edgelordy. Edgelord adjacent”, she laughs. “I need to work on it”.
つ;´・ω-)つ
Dzinic cites Emin, Sophie Calle and Jamian Juliano Villani as references: three artists that use biography, recording the mess of their lives, but still turn out show after show. “I’m intrigued by the intensity of the façade”, she says, “artist biographies will always be intrinsically connected to pain. It’s mediagenic—like with me being trans, people always try to paint a dark side. There is always a demand that the artist must suffer. Maybe that’s true, but maybe it’s not true. I don’t know if all these people suffer. I don’t know if Picasso was sad all the time. But I think it seems that it’s also fine to be fine”.
（＾∀＾）
Ekstasis, in ancient Greek, means to stand or to be outside of oneself. In his 2009 book Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz describes how ecstasy was understood as having a sense of timeliness’s motion, comprehending a unity of the past, the future, and the present. He says this has the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality, “a thing that is not the linearity that many of us have been calling straight time. Dzinic’s layered traces of life, from her youth to today, recorded with image-making tools as both instrument and muse, are not remnants or copies; they’re plot points—markers of originals. They’re an antidote to onism, or the frustration of existing in just one body, inhabiting one place at a time, felt as an awareness of how limited human experience of the world is. This antidote is assembled with neural media—media embodied: floating grids, tangled wires, all under the deft fingertips of a girl online, wrapping herself in the cotton wool of shimmering filters and crystalline pixels, a world that would become realer than real.
(＠￣∀￣)σ
“I feel like we have reached a point where we have real capitalist subsumption, and there is no outside. I am haunted”, she admits, “but I don’t want to be haunted. I’m not the solution. I just try to find the stuff, the vibes, to curate in a way that feels emancipatory”. Her process of reinvention and self-plagiarising isn’t born from survival, but from joy, and in our stifling present, maybe joy is more radical than we think. The idea of images being dislocated from their indexical claim to truth, to many, may strike fear and uncertainty. But by narrating her own processes of image-making, Dzinic outruns the ways in which her identity could be policed, co-opted, mined or repurposed. She reveals the ecstatic potential of this severance: a temporality all of her own.
（⌒∀⌒）ノ
She pauses on the subject of jankiness and debris. A world that controls and abolishes, just as it enfleshes and amplifies. Where, all around us, capital spits out shadows of beautiful bullshit. Supermarket flowers, forgotten fairgrounds, swag eras, auramaxxing:
~(゜▽゜*)
“…either you start to find the beauty in it, or you just rot. I don’t want to rot. I reject rotting”.
凸(`д´メ)
- Text/Fin Cousins
- Designer/Pauline Hill
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