Nanda van den Berg, director of the Huis Marseille photography museum in Amsterdam will introduce us to her research into film and photographic images in the era of new technologies such as generative AI. Featuring images and excerpts from the artists Heesoo Kwon and Charmaine Poh.
Nanda van den Berg is director of Huis Marseille, and curator of the exhibition Shadow Self – Portal to a Parallel World. For Shadow Self, five artists were invited to investigate parallel worlds through a personal or autobiographical approach.
Nanda van den Berg highlights the artists Heesoo Kwon (South Korea, 1990) and Charmaine Poh (Singapore, 1990). The former made a montage especially for this show at Eye of the experiments she did during the creative development of Going Home, a work in which she uses AI to expand her childhood photographs, putting Korean history and the family archive in a new historical perspective. She shares her thoughts on the new collaborative possibilities AI offers her.
The ‘shadow self’ that inhabits the parallel world points the way to another dimension. What’s it like, for example, to endlessly circulate on the internet as the twelve-year-old child you once were – which is what happened to artist Charmaine Poh? In the early 2000s she acted as a child star in the television series We Are R.E.M. and this experience underpins The Young Body Universe, from which several works can be seen this evening. Through an online lecture performance, she addresses the plethora of questions surrounding virtual ownership.
Charmaine Poh was recently announced as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2025