Installation

Is digital technology encouraging the communication of our emotions? Daniah
Al Saleh questions in this show the obligation to smile to everything in our digital
era’s messages brought by the emoji’s fashion. The emoji phenomenon has been
developed massively around for 20 years, in the same parallel time of the booming
development of the digital facilities which placed the computer at the right center of
our social and economic lives. Art is part of this global digital world. It is not a
casualty if Daniah Alsaleh is exploring the emojis language through an art medium
which is also a language itself. Indeed, Computing is a techno-logy, meaning a
technique which is also a language. Daniah Alsaleh’s exhibition looks like a mise en
abyme: a language technique exploring another language format. Perhaps only this
form of art could explore enough deeply the emojis language – as a form of
language (achieved or not)? Confronting an immaterial expression of her vision with
a material one in the same show is another major aspect of Daniah’s work. The
show is articulated in two parallel movements, presenting digital works facing a
series of paintings, all focused on the same theme of the emojis language. A last
section offers a conclusion to this highly original confrontation, through a very
innovative installation, mixing painting and digital projection. Daniah Al Saleh
reminds us that the said “immaterial” world is nothing but another kind of “material”.
When the art world often opposes “digital” exhibitions versus painting exhibitions,
Daniah imposes her art beyond the banal statements about digital art we can hear.
Daniah’s works question also the visual identity of the Emojis, born in the code after
the smiley graphic inspiration. The Emojis phenomenon is as well a mere computing
form of visual communication as a pictographic code. A visual object balanced
between its digital and graphic identities. No other artist before Daniah has found the
right expression to raise this ambiguous essence of the emojis - though the smiley
was used in many art works. Daniah choses as her subject the emoticonist culture of
our time - certainly the most fascinating topic raised by the Emojis. A philosophical
issue matching with a digital era who wants absolutely to be ultra positive despite all
the turmoiled aspects of it.
Curator: Jerome Neutres