The Instagram Project is a constellation of works looking at the Instagram images that knowingly or not participate in the construction and consumption of the Chinese as a spectacle of ‘the other’ yet often mistaken as the societal reality.

With a satirical and analytical approach, the project takes the images (and the words accompanying them) out of Instagram, dissect, alter, and repurpose them to create new meanings and contexts. Each work within the project tackles a certain type of images with a specific method, undoing the underlying ethnocentric value judgements that fuel the popularity of them.

In Provocative Jokes, a handful of the numerous Instagram jokes made at the expense of the objectification of real people are deconstructed, each broken into three parts – people, words, captions. The flicking through jokes, readily to be laughed at, are turned into separate entities demanding viewers’ attention and thinking, making up their own minds on what is at stake with these secret pleasures.

Quirky Science Questions is a set of unexpected science questions devised based on images and video clips from Instagram. The reading of the images shifts as they are given a new function, liberating them from the narrow-minded. The questions are produced in collaboration with Theodora Ntoka, an education researcher.

Image Captions in Order of Appearance:

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Provocative Jokes, installation view at Broken Secrets, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena, Italy, July-August 2021, photo courtesy of Rolando Paolo Guerzoni

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Quirky Science Questions, risograph prints, size varies

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Quirky Science Questions, installation view at Under (De)construction, Landskrona Foto Festival, Landskrona, Sweden, Sep 2020, photo courtesy of Anna Siggelkow

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Quirky Science Questions, installation view at Broken Secrets, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena, Italy, July-August 2021, photo courtesy of Rolando Paolo Guerzoni