Noura Tafeche shared her ongoing research on online visual cultures cross mixing cute-kawaii, violent-military and gaming aesthetics. Noura guided the audience through the nooks and crannies of The Kawayoku Inception archival project.
Accomplished over four years of research on social media and online micro-communities, this ongoing archive was built to catalogue nearly 30,000 files within a map of the digital platforms where the phenomenon proliferates.
The project ranges from military propaganda translated into choreographic dance routines and challenges, to the weeb alt-right incel imaginary intertwined with cute manga fan-art.
Noura Tafeche is a visual artist, independent researcher, and onomaturge. She graduated in New Technologies for Art from the Brera Academy, with a particular focus on the field of net.art and radical entertainment. She later pursued university studies in Philosophy.
Her artistic journey unfolds through laboratory methods and practices, video, installation, onomaturgy, and miniature drawing. Her research areas delve into the study of phenomena related to online visual cultures, the aestheticization of violence on digital platforms, linguistic experimentation, and the visual representation of speculative theories. She has exhibited, given lectures, and conducted workshops at transmediale (Berlin), Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Aarhus Kunsthal (Aarhus), Design Museum (Helsinki), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), Place Ville Marie (Montreal), Triennale Milano (Milan), Almanac Inn (Turin), John Cabot University (Rome), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), Stevenson Gallery (Baltimore), and the European Union Representative Centre (Palestine).
Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
