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Neïl Beloufa – Humanities

Q.U.I.C.H.E.

I have to create a profile. First I enter my name and gender, then other details that are surprisingly personal. Finally, the low-hanging box at the entrance to Neïl Beloufa's 'Humanities' exhibition scans my face from various angles. Bent over in front of the sensor, I look up, look down, stare deep into the mechanical eyes of the scanner and then have to choose one from the series of unflattering, half-exposed photos. So far, so dystopian.

My cell phone vibrates and I receive a QR code with which I can become active in the exhibition's various installations. Pseudo-active at least, as I am ultimately only asked to select something from a set of options.

The first room is impressively ugly. Banal objects made of painted lightweight foam stand lovelessly and unsightly in metal frames. “Please select”. What if I just think they all suck? Choose anyway. Choose the lesser of two evils. That's something I've practiced. But what I'm being offered here are soulless proxies of a world that is complicating itself and evading all sensibility. Nevertheless: “Please choose”.

As I choose, spotlights dance around me, over walls and objects (I refuse to call these things 'sculptures'). The exhibition isn't just gamification, it's almost gameshowification. Perhaps if I scan my personalized QR code often enough and thus participate in this hierarchy-building, repulsive system, I will win something?

Is gamification always also a normalization of surveillance? Why do I have to create profiles to do the most rudimentary things? As much as Beloufa's show and objects annoy me, they also raise questions about how we move through space and time. Even the movements of our eyes are tracked to generate data for marketing purposes. This is probably not the case with Beloufa.

Nevertheless, after scan module number five, I'm no longer in the mood and decide to refuse the game show. I try to find other ways to access the ugly objects. I don't succeed. The surfaces are cheap, everything is industrial and banal. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Beloufa has deliberately opted for such concentrated ugliness.

Is this a corona show?


I'm reminded of the pandemic, when the world was covered in cheap plastic and I was trying to gain access to events with QR codes. Maybe Covid was a marketing scam by the QR code industry? Is that what Beloufa is getting at? Is the exhibition a subtle lockdown critique? All this data and profiles! No brain has capacity for so many passwords.
Covid, the golden age of digitized gatekeeping strategies. I had Covid for the first time in fall 2020. I was almost impressed by how stupid Covid made me feel. Sometimes I wonder if the brain fog has remained. Whether that's why I just don't understand some things anymore. This Beloufa exhibition, for example. Why do I have to scan it? Why is it all so ugly? Why is it so banal? Something ugly can be interesting, but this is repulsive in its soulless pictogram-like quality. No object can retain even a hint of meaning if it is designed like this. In addition to the horrible foam-carved objects, CNC-milled MDF panels hang on the walls. MDF is the end of all poetry. Projected onto these panels (in room 3) are AI-like glitch animations in which voices make fun of pronouns and yoga teachers. Where have I ended up here? Why doesn't it stop? Why do I have to scan my cell phone - only for nothing to happen? I hate this exhibition with every fiber of my body and don't want to be here anymore.
Beloufa is using the last - most beautiful - room on the first floor of the Basel Kunsthalle for huge projections of a video smorgasbord. I have inwardly given up. But there is one last scanning machine. So, one more time! I scan the QR code on my cell phone. The text in the room promises that a video created especially for me and with me will now be rendered and projected live. But the machine says: “Please choose your objects on terminal D first”. The system refuses. I haven't been good enough. Nothing can be created by and with me in the grand finale if I haven't gone through all the absurd steps first. If you don't participate in the meaningless pseudo-individualization, you won't get any part of the result in the end. That's a good description of our times. And I hate it so much.