The Gospels of Aerial

The exhibition explores the condition of human existence within the digital sphere - a space in which clear ethical standards and effective regulations concerning hate speech and digital violence have yet to be fully established. Women-Antennas employ AI tools and digital art, combining them with the aesthetics of the late Middle Ages in order to question the functioning of human beings - and above all women - within this contemporary sphere of everyday life. Like the world itself, the internet remains deeply patriarchal. Within this space, women continue to be exploited, objectified, and diminished. The artists address the experience of women in online environments that enable perpetrators to form misogynistic communities, such as incel groups, and to exploit technologies including deepfakes in order to create hypersexualized images of women, objectify them, and construct erotic fantasies around them. In an ironic gesture, Women-Antennas create deepfake versions of their own images and place them within objects that reference medieval iconography and historical contexts. The exhibition is structured around three spheres of reference to the Middle Ages. Women-Antennas draw parallels between contemporary incel communities and medieval monastic orders, in which celibacy becomes not only a voluntary or imposed condition, but also a virtue that increasingly distances men from women and femininity itself. Much like in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the appearance of a woman generates anxiety and chaos, while hatred is fuelled by the suppression of human desires and needs. As in monastic orders, the creation of closed communities based on mutual validation and the construction of collective identity through exclusion from the outside world becomes the primary mechanism driving these groups. Women-Antennas address this issue through their series Gardens of Solitude. Another aspect explored by the duo concerns the use of real people’s images to create deepfakes and the power embedded within this act. A person can easily be transformed into an anime girl with exaggerated sexual features or into a naked digital animation subjected to someone else’s fantasies. This seemingly simple act of digital violence becomes a form of torture based on the loss of control over one’s own image and identity. To visualize this problem, Women-Antennas draw upon references to medieval torture devices. At the same time, they closely examine the perpetrators themselves, recognizing in their actions both cruelty and pathetic absurdity. These issues are explored in the series LoRa. A further aspect of the exhibition focuses on the persistence of a medieval ideal of womanhood within the internet: the virtuous, delicate, virginal woman modelled after the Virgin Mary. This figure is contrasted with the iconography of the free, self-assured, and sexual witch. This juxtaposition simultaneously references historical art and ironically exposes the continued persistence of archaic social values. To represent these themes, the duo employs techniques inspired by medieval craftsmanship, creating tapestries and stained glass works reminiscent of those produced during the period.