Gretta Louw
Gretta Louw received her BA in 2001 from the University of Western Australia and Honours in Psychology in 2002, before moving to Germany in 2007. In recent years her work has been exhibited in public institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, and the Stadtmuseum Munich. She will be an artist in residence at the 2017 MozFest - a cooperation between the Mozilla Foundation, the Tate, and the V&A - at Ravensbourne College in London, and is the curator of the upcoming exhibition Networking the Unseen at the Villa Merkel museum in Esslingen, Germany.
The Face-Swap Archive is an exploration of the monstrous in algorithmic sight. While most selfie apps appeal to our vanity, offering us more attractive, likeable versions of ourselves, face-swap technology offers the opposite: a horrifying glimpse of ourselves distorted through an algorithmic lens. The expansive collection of clips illuminates the parameters according to which an algorithm defines a face - often resulting in bizarre errors like a dress hanging on a coat hanger that somehow becomes a mask to be worn. These diverse digital masks are stretched like cloth over the face and as the subject in the videos moves, plays with the mask, and interacts with it, we begin to get a sense of its materiality.
www.grettalouw.com