In a time when we are used to thinking in terms of images and references, dealing quickly with images becomes routine. Recurring images in particular are speedily filtered and actively overlooked like irritating advertisements. For people who spend most of their quotidian online and have already completed the internet twice, images and videos with a low number of views or few connections take on a kind of precious significance.
Medjid Sopi (b. 1999, lives and works in Zurich) has been operating the Instagram account @deathhh420 since 2016, which gives an impression of the dialectic that can be created by the treatment of found footage, the use of unused and even indecent memes, as well as the celebration of exceptional internet personalities who either embrace being on display or subvert it due to their low reach. He shows what it is like to treat the internet like an archaeological site, and beyond the homogenised aesthetic, to consider images that do not meet mainstream criteria and thus are difficult to categorise like valuable finds. His work illustrates his love for the ordinary and unconsidered as much as for the explicitly extravagant, and exaggerated – a visual language that could only be born out of the globalised and everyday use of the internet.
Medjid Sopi is making a new video work for Backrooms that will be shown twice on Saturday, 26 March 2022, 4pm and 6pm.
Venue: Kunsthalle Zürich, Ebene A
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich
To the video on YouTube
Image: Medjid Sopi, 2022
