Soft Screens is a group exhibition about the interfaces of our hypermediated reality. Featuring artists Nouf Aljowaysir, Anna Frants, Alexandra Lerman, and Mari Nagem, Soft Screens explores the ways digital media subliminally shape our attention, habits, and agency.

Whether by Captcha command or so-called "intelligent" search, algorithmic systems inhabit—and inhibit—our cognitive and emotional dexterity. How does it feel when a computer translates our identity into data (especially when predicated on Western biases and centralization)? How does silky-smooth screen-swiping alter our relationship with the tactile environment? In the shared dimension of virtual and real, what does it mean to be present?

Bringing together practices that reflect on emergent technologies without strictly relying on them, Soft Screens traces the outline of our entanglement with ever-evolving digital systems and social structures.

This is our inaugural exhibition. Please join us as we highlight four incredible artists and celebrate what we are developing at MESH_arts.

- Artists -

Nouf Aljowaysir
Ceremonial Ancestors
Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?)

Nouf Aljowaysir is a visual artist whose practice critically examines the role of algorithmic intelligence in shaping personal and collective constructions of selfhood and historical knowledge. Working across photography and moving image, she creates narratives that move between archival materials, memory and particularly non-Western histories.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at Jeude Paume, Photo Élysée, M+ Museum, Rhizome, and KADIST, among others, and featured in Le Monde, BBC Culture, and The New York Times. She is a recipient of the 2023 Lumen Prize for Moving Image.

Anna Frants
Artists Union
Peck of Salt

Anna Frants is an international New Media artist and curator who co-founded CYLAND Media Art Lab. As Co-Founder of Cyland, Frants organizes exhibitions at art and technology institutions around the world; as a curator and artist, Frants is a voice in the cultural dialogue surrounding experimental and new media art. Anna Frants’ interactive art installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the St. Petersburg Biennial, Moscow Biennial and Polish Biennial, the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the Pratt Institute (New York, USA), Her works can be found in collections of the Museum of Art and Design, the State Russian Museum, Kolodzei Art Foundation, the Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Modern Art and numerous private collections around the world.

Alexandra Lerman
Swipe Swipe Swipe, Crowning

Alexandra Lerman is a New York–based artist whose work examines historical moments in which language, bodily gesture, expressive freedom, and natural ecosystems come into conflict with forces of private, institutional, and governmental control, including copyright, artistic ownership, and digital licensing. Lerman’s individual and collaborative projects have been presented at the Sculpture Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Artists Space, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, and the Queens Museum in New York. She has participated in the LMCC Workspace Program, Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, and The Art & Law Program in New York, as well as Banff Centre’s 01The Retreat: A Position of DOCUMENTA (13) in Alberta, Canada.

Mari Nagem
The Splash

Mari Nagem is a Brazilian-born interdisciplinary artist conceptually driven by the relationship between nature and technology. Navigating different media, using luminous colors and sharp edges, Nagem creates works that illuminate critical aspects of the information age. Investigating the artificiality of landscapes, climate crisis, and data subjectivity, she raises social and existential questions while rediscovering care, intuition, and sensibility in the relationship with our semi-synthetic environment. In 2025, Mari was awarded the S+T+Arts Buen-TEK Residence Program (Rome, IT and Fortaleza, BR), commissioned a public piece for the COP30 by the Tomie Ohtake Institute for the Emílio Goeldi Zoobotanical Park and Museum (Belém, BR), and was featured in Art Dialogues Magazine (NY, US).