Taiwan presents “Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan” as its Collateral Event at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), the exhibition runs from May 9 to November 22, 2026, at the historic Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice. Artist Li Yi-Fan and curator Raphael Fonseca, both shaped by the rise of the internet, explore the melancholy induced by prolonged screen use and the anxieties of the digital age, including information overload and rapid AI development. The presentation features a new 60-minute video work centered on an “eyeball” returning home, accompanied by two smaller video pieces and large-scale 3D-printed sculptures of body parts that serve as both installation elements and seating. Drawing on Li’s practice of digital puppetry and real-time game engines, the immersive installation blurs boundaries between physical space, virtual imagery, and human perception. The project connects contemporary technological concerns with historical references such as Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. Public programs and a new bilingual artist book will accompany the exhibition.

Taiwan in Venice 2026: Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan
. TFAM of Taiwan Collateral Event at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition walkthrough, impressions from the opening, and interviews with the artist Li Yi-Fan and the curator Raphael Fonseca. Venice (Italy), May 7, 2026.

Press release (excerpt):

Taiwan in Venice 2026: Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan
. TFAM of Taiwan Collateral Event at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

New works debut to reflect on humanity’s contemporary relationship with technology

Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia will be held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni from May 9 to November 22, 2026. During the opening week, from May 7 to May 9, a series of public programs will be held in the afternoons. The opening ceremony will take place on the evening of May 7. In a press conference today (March 31), artist Li Yi-Fan, together with the curator Raphael Fonseca and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum team, unveiled further details of the brand-new video artwork that will be presented.

In this year’s “TFAM of Taiwan Collateral Event,” the artist and curator, who both came of age when internet technology first exploded, serve as observers of the era of digital transformation, offering fresh perspectives and contemporary insights through narratives infused with humor and absurdity. Originally conceived in Portuguese, the title ‘Melancolia de tela’ refers to the state of melancholy induced by prolonged screen use. As it evolves across languages into English and Chinese, new nuances unfolded under different contexts. The state of ‘Melancholy’ addresses the anxiety stemming from information overload in the digital age and the rapid development of AI, reflecting the increasingly flattened sensory experiences and emotional states of individuals.

Fonseca traces the artist’s creative trajectory, from his first work, A Walk by the Sea (2011), to his new creation for this year’s Biennale Arte 2026, examining the evolution of his visual techniques and narrative rhythm, and how his scope of awareness has come to encompass contemporary digital culture. Simultaneously placing this under the lens of Western art history, Fonseca draws inspiration from German artist Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 work Melencolia I, bridging the Renaissance-era contemplation of the human condition and a present-day reflection on technological and visual anxieties.

TFAM director Li-Chen Loh notes, “For years, Taipei Fine Arts Museum has contributed to the cultural discourses of different periods through a range of exhibition strategies, showcasing the distinctiveness of Taiwanese art within the global context. This year, the curator is helping broaden the contextual framework of the artist Li Yi-Fan’s works with an outlook that transcends culture and geography. This enables the TFAM of Taiwan Collateral Event in Venice to keep breaking new ground in discourse and international exchange. The curator and artist are focusing on how we reinterpret the world and redefine our own place in it, as imagery becomes increasingly instantaneous and infinitely replicable.”
Born in Taipei, Li Yi-Fan is currently participating in an artist residency of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten program in Amsterdam. Having long developed his own video production tools and refined a creative approach known as ‘digital puppetry’, Li began using utilized real-time game engines in 2021 as a means to make animation production a more intuitive process, transforming images into a form of private exploration and metacognition. Through his work, Li also reveals the power structures underlying imagery, re-examines the relationship between human and video technology, exploring how imagery shapes human perception. “Screen Melancholy” marks a pivotal new phase in the artist’s creative practice. Bringing together years of research in visual technology, it searches for the essence of humanity within the gaps in machine learning and generative AI, leading us to ponder our current state of expanding knowledge and technological anxiety.

Taipei Fine Arts Museum began hosting exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Prigioni since 1995. This building was built in the early 17th century as a prison connected to the Palazzo Ducale, and prisoners of the past were fated to walk between the two as they proceeded to the cells where they would spend the rest of their lives. Li engages with the historical and architectural context of the Palazzo delle Prigioni, creating an unprecedented work that integrates the physical space into its visual narrative. As viewers walk into this ‘container’ of images, sounds, and sculptures, they seem to awaken bodily memories as they engage with the work. Amid the interplay of the physical and the virtual, viewers are drawn into an intimate, immersive experience of at once “watching” and “being watched”.

Centered in the space is a 60-minute new video work, accompanied by 2 new videos on smaller screens. In the main video, Li tells a story of an ‘eyeball’ returning home, as a way to explore the layered relations between humans and images. Narrated like an instructional video in the tone of an improvisational soliloquy, the work reflects on explanations of computer animation and AIgenerated imagery, discussing the difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. Through dialogues featuring the reunion of various ‘human organs’, he reflects on the impact of AI on humanity. As the video unfolds, the scenes shift, transforming the Palazzo delle Prigioni into a dramatically dynamic stage, where desire entwines with fear, exposing the close relationship millennials have with technology.

Continuing with his longstanding interest in models, digital puppetry, and simulated set compositions, the artist will install large-scale 3D-printed sculptures of hands, feet, heads, and limbs around the space, echoing the bodies of the digital performers on screen. As viewers watch the videos, they will be surrounded by these giant body fragments, which will also serve as seats to rest on. This creates a dramatic scene of deconstruction derived from computer-generated imagery that blurs the boundary between “reality” and “digital” space.

Li Yi-Fan comments, “My practice has always been rooted in the personal emotions, but in this project, I ask how these intimate thoughts resonate collectively with others from my generation. I hope viewers of Screen Melancholy embrace both a solitude journey and also join a shared venture to the world we all live in right now, reshaped by technology and dictated by algorithms. Image was once so important. It connects us with the world like a window. But now that we realize this window is nothing but a flat surface, how should we respond?”

“Using such tools as real-time engines and modeling systems, Yi-Fan deconstructs the structure of image-production technology,” Raphael Fonseca observes. “When this intersects with the dark humor he often employs in his works, he sheds light on a certain melancholia that connects all viewers in front of a flat screen. As the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close, rather than offering magical solutions or moralizing responses to the post-fictions and digital narcissisms that grow ever more constricted, Yi-Fan suggests that each of us contains something of the prisoner, the puppeteer and the puppet. He allows us to accept the melancholia of this condition and get ready to embrace an existence as flattened as a screen. And this is only the beginning.”

On the afternoon of the opening day, a public talk will be held between Li and Fonseca, in which they will share the creative process behind the exhibition. Afterward, the South Korean artist Eunju Hong will present She seemed devastated, when I was weeping with joy, a dance exploration of melancholy and bodily movement. Alongside the opening, TFAM will also release a new bilingual Artist Book documenting Li’s artistic career. Following a dialogue between Fonseca and Li, the book walks through 13 keywords such as ‘windows,’ ‘machinima,’ ‘physical body’ and ‘controller’ that connect the artist’s important previous works. The book will be available for purchase at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Bookstore in May.

About the Artist, Li Yi-Fan
Li Yi-Fan (b. 1989) lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. He often explores the relationship between people and technology in the digital age with a unique sense of black humor. He excels at using self-developed game engines and, working as a one-person crew, im-provisationally acting out the narratives that lie in the background behind image pro-duction. In recent years, with the support of such projects as the National Culture and Arts Foundation’s “WSAD” and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab’s “Toolkit of Mad-ness,” Li has conducted studies on machinima and developed a series of game-engine-based image production toolkits to create artworks such as important_message_360. mp4, rewiring, howdoyouturnthison, and What Is Your Favorite Primitive. He has also been featured in the 2020 Taiwan Biennial “Subzoology,” the 2020 Digital Art Festival Taipei “01_LOVE,” the 2021 Asian Art Biennial “Phantasmapolis,” and the 2023 Taipei Biennial “Small World.”
His work was also featured in the 2024 Art Spectrum exhibition “Dream Screen” at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. In 2024, he received the Hong Foundation’s NTD 1 million (USD 31,000) 8th Tung Chung Prize for a newly commissioned work. With support from the Hong Foundation, Li is a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten program in Amsterdam for 2024–25.
Previously, What Is Your Favorite Primitive garnered him the 46th Golden Harvest Award in 2024 at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. He won the Visual Arts Award at the 2022 Taishin Arts Award for his earlier work howdoyouturnthison (2021), which explored virtual reality and image-making tools.

About the Curator, Raphael Fonseca
Raphael Fonseca, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, lives in Denver, United States. He is curator and head of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum, where he has worked since 2021. Currently, he is one of the curators for Counterpublic 2026, a Triennial opening next September in St. Louis, United States. He is also co-curating the 13th edition of Sequences, a visual arts biennial in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2027. He was the chief curator of the 14th Mercosul Biennial in 2025. From 2023 to 2025, ArtReview magazine listed him among the 100 most influential people in the global visual arts.
Notable projects include “Fullgás: Visual Arts and the 1980s in Brazil” (Centro Cultural Ban-co do Brasil, 2024-2025); “Sandra Vásquez de La Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” (Denver Art Museum, 2024); “Memory is an editing station”, 22a Biennale SESC_Videobrasil (SESC 24 maggio, San Paolo, 2023)“; “Sweat” (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2021); and “Lost and Found” (ICA Singapore, 2019).

Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Founded in 1983, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is the very first museum of modern and contemporary art in Taiwan. Venturing into its 43rd year, TFAM has dedicated itself to the development of local artists in Taiwan while staying abreast of ongoing trends in international art scenes. It has pioneered the biennial trends for the region and overseen the operations of the Taipei Biennial since 1998, and the participation as Collateral Event at the International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia since 1995, coloring its visions with stronger overtones of global strategy.

The Vitra Design Museum, in collaboration with Verner Panton Design AG, presents a comprehensive retrospective on the Danish designer Verner Panton (1926–1998) at the Vitra Schaudepot to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The exhibition explores the full range of Panton’s creative output, from iconic furniture pieces such as the Panton Chair and Cone Chair to lighting designs, textiles, and visionary interior concepts. A highlight is a walk-in reconstruction of his legendary Fantasy Landscape (1970), offering visitors direct experience of his sculptural, colour-rich environments.

Trained as an architect and initially influenced by Arne Jacobsen, Panton developed a distinctive style from the late 1950s onward, emphasising bold colour, playful forms, and innovative use of synthetic materials. The chronologically arranged exhibition covers his major projects from the 1950s through the 1990s, including the Visiona exhibitions, corporate and restaurant interiors, and previously lesser-known architectural concepts.

Drawing extensively from the Verner Panton Archive, the show provides a detailed overview of his systematic approach to design and his lasting impact on 20th-century design.

Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space / Vitra Design Museum, Vitra Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein (Germany). Vernissage, May 22, 2026.

Plato Gallery in New York is hosting two concurrent solo exhibitions from June 4 to July 11, 2026: Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels, and Vadim Pugin: The Walled Garden. Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, features a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. In The Walled Garden, New York–based artist Vadim Pugin presents a new body of work exploring the contours of subjectivity in an era shaped by commodified attention and engineered desire. The exhibition brings together ceramics, sound, video, and fabric installation within an environment the artist describes as Cyber Baroque: a logic of excess in which surveillance has learned to disguise itself as seduction.
Plato is a contemporary art gallery founded by Elena Platonova with the goal of cultivating intercultural dialogue. It mainly focuses on the work of artists with diverse cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds, who maintain continuity with the traditions of art history while creating new ones. Plato particularly welcomes the mixed types, the misfits, multihyphenates, immigrants, hybrids and those who can see the world through the eyes of the other. The gallery is housed in a ground-level space on the historic Bowery, half a block from the New Museum in New York.

Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels, and Vadim Pugin: The Walled Garden. Two solo exhibitions at Plato Gallery New York. Impressions from the opening, New York City, June 4, 2026.

Press texts (excerpt):

Cindy Bernhard: Broken Vessels

PLATO is honored to present Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, featuring a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. It will be on view in the gallery’s ground-floor space from June 4 through July 11.
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At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that stand in for humanity itself — wounded, imperfect, yet still capable of transformation.
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The exhibition emerged after what the artist describes as a profound spiritual awakening, an experience connected to the concept of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ articulated by the 16th-century Spanish poet and theologian St. John of the Cross. During a period of emotional hardship, Bernhard underwent an intense feeling of joy and “unity with the cosmos.” “I was flooded with images of these gold vessels reminiscent of the body,” Bernhard explains. “Seven paintings representing the seven deadly sins, and one that stands for this feeling of wholeness.” The eighth painting, reminiscent of an overexposed photograph and devoid of the colorful exuberance that defines the others, was inspired by the Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus.
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Throughout Broken Vessels, the metal functions as both a spiritual symbol and cultural critique. Across civilizations, gold has signified enlightenment, sacred ritual and immortality — from Christian icons and gilded chalices to Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and the golden light of higher consciousness in yogic traditions. Bernhard places these associations against the backdrop of contemporary materialism, where greed, spectacle and the pursuit of power increasingly replace or corrupt spiritual inquiry.
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The vessels themselves bear razor-thin fractures and weathered surfaces, referencing both bodily vulnerability and psychic erosion. Bernhard describes these cracks as “microfractures in our souls.” The relentless pace of the news cycle, political extremity and collective anxiety become invisible pressures acting upon the spirit. Despite this atmosphere of rupture, the paintings also suggest the possibility of redemption. Light, water, fire and smoke recur throughout the exhibition as symbols of purification and divine presence.
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Technically, Broken Vessels marks a new development in Bernhard’s practice. The artist built luminous surfaces by preserving exposed areas of raw canvas beneath translucent glazes, allowing light to emerge through the paintings. The new sanding techniques and razor-incised fissures heighten the sense of fragility and wear. Inspired in part by filmmaker Terrence Malick and his juxtaposition of intimate human experience with cosmic imagery, Bernhard introduces constellations throughout the exhibition as reminders of humanity’s relationship to a larger universe.
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The works embrace a distinctly contemporary visual language. Ultra-precise astronomical imagery fuses with the aesthetics of Hollywood cinema, music videos and digital effects — all rendered painstakingly through traditional painting techniques. Dramatic lighting, theatrical compositions and monumental scale recall Baroque painting while speaking to a contemporary moment equally shaped by excess and the search for meaning.
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Broken Vessels invites viewers into a contemplative encounter with brokenness and the possibility of spiritual renewal. The exhibition asks what remains sacred in an age defined by spectacle, consumption and fragmentation, suggesting that transcendence can still perhaps emerge through the cracks.

Cindy Bernhard (b. 1989, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2014 and her BFA from the American Academy of Art in 2011.
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Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include PLATO, New York, NY (2026), Volery Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2025), Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2024), Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2024), Long Story Short, New York, NY (2024) and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY (2023). Bernhard’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at numerous galleries, including Harper’s Gallery, New York, NY (2024), The Bunker Art Space, Palm Beach, FL (2024), De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024), PLATO, New York, NY (2024), Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL (2024), Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA (2024), Casa Santa Ana, Panama City, Panama (2024), Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY (2023), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, IL (2022), Carlye Packer, Palm Springs, CA (2022), Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2022), Field Projects, New York, NY (2021) and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2020), among many others.
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Bernhard’s work has been written about in various publications, including Bad at Sports, Broccoli, Hypebeast, Juxtapoz, Newcity, New American Paintings and New York Magazine. Her work is in the collections of several institutions, including the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, Spain and Zuzan’s Collection at Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga, Latvia.

PLATO is excited to announce the opening of Vadim Pugin’s solo exhibition at PLATO, The Walled Garden, on Thursday, June 4, from 6–8 pm. The show will be on view through July 11.
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In The Walled Garden, New York–based artist Vadim Pugin presents a new body of work exploring the contours of subjectivity in an era shaped by commodified attention and engineered desire.
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The exhibition brings together ceramics, sound, video, and fabric installation within an environment the artist describes as Cyber Baroque: a logic of excess in which surveillance has learned to disguise itself as seduction. Ceramic mascarons — architectural masks historically embedded in Baroque facades — establish the exhibition’s spatial order, functioning as autonomous agents that guide the viewers’ movement while simultaneously returning their gaze.
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The exhibition’s title, The Walled Garden, is borrowed from advertising technology — the industry in which Pugin worked for nearly two decades. The term describes a closed digital ecosystem where user data is collected, contained, analyzed, and monetized. Drawing on the artist’s firsthand experience with targeting infrastructures, bidding markets, and behavioral modeling, the exhibition aims to reveal the systems that make platforms feel as though they have read your mind. That uncanny precision becomes an inverted panopticon: a structure extending across urban and personal space, endlessly hungry for data.
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In creating The Walled Garden, Pugin turned to the allegory of the historical Baroque garden, which was never truly a sanctuary, but a machine for observation. Its rigid geometries, forced perspectives, and unnatural symmetries offered no retreat to those who wandered through it. From the highest palace window, the sovereign watched. Similarly, Pugin reconstructs the architecture of control embedded within online platforms: the curated feed as endless folds of illusory abundance, the recommendation engine as a maze of garden paths, and the algorithm as a sovereign force that has already determined the direction of our movement.
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Several ceramic works embody these mechanisms. Engagement is one such piece: glazed in reptilian green, with a network of spikes surrounding a striking trefoil centered around a small circle, it resembles an overgrown biohazard sign. The algorithm does not reward what is truthful; it rewards what is reactive. Social media feeds are an echo chamber where the loudest impact is amplified and placed in the center. This Engagement creature was bred in and thrives within that kind of toxic environment.
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Another ceramic, Attachment, is adorned with a glowing red lens that quietly watches the viewers as they move through the space. The digital red dot — the “unread” count in the corner of an application icon — is not merely a signal, but a lure, refined across billions of interactions until it bypasses deliberation entirely and reaches directly into the nervous system. The notification is any platform’s most domesticated visual cue and its most predatory. Here, it blooms into an ominous plant: armored, deep-sea-like, curled protectively around the glowing eye it uses to find you.
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For Pugin, ceramics function as a high-technology medium with its own agency. His approach to it mimics his experience in music production: forms are constructed through additive and subtractive gestures analogous to sound synthesis; glazed surfaces, fired at 2,200°F, emerge through chemical processes in which rare-earth elements and metals fuse and crystallize into outcomes the artist can guide but never fully control. Once fired, ceramic carries the potential to outlast its viewer. A material directed but never completely commanded, a duration that exceeds the human — the medium itself rehearses the conditions of the systems the exhibition seeks to expose.
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What grows inside this garden is no longer fully legible even to its gardeners. AI cannot be understood simply as something engineered; what is built instead is the infrastructure and the environment in which it takes root, growing with a speed and invasiveness that even its architects cannot predict. Increasingly, even developers enter a state where it is no longer clear who is curating whom.
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And if those who built the walls are losing that clarity, what of those who merely tend their own digital spaces — pausing, scrolling, lingering, desiring? Are they cultivating a garden, or simply serving as its fertilizer?
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The exhibition does not answer this question so much as transform its terms. Pugin refuses both the fantasy of escape and the comfort of resignation. The central operation of Cyber Baroque is to render the garden’s hidden agents visible — targeting systems and surfaces that watch back — so they may be understood as infrastructure rather than fate. Pugin’s wager is that political imagination cannot remain the privilege of those who design the walls. It must instead become the practice of those who inhabit them so they can learn to move through the garden on their own terms.
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Vadim Pugin (b. 1986, Moscow, Russia) is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, video, and sound. His sculptures and installations combine handmade materials with computational systems to create objects that appear to sense, gaze back at and respond to the viewer. Moving between the tangible and the digital, Pugin investigates how contemporary perception is shaped by platforms, surveillance, feedback loops, and algorithmic systems of control.

Vadim Pugin holds a Master’s degree from the Russian State University for the Humanities. He studied contemporary art through the Learning Environment program in Moscow, where he worked in the studios of Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::), Alexander Povzner, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Pugin’s recent exhibitions include Exaltation, PLATO, New York, NY (2025); The New Uncanny at The New Uncanny Gallery, New York, NY (2025); IX Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, and Everything Counts, Ground Solyanka, Moscow, Russia (2022). Pugin was the winner of the Vyksa Festival Open Competition for Urban Sculpture as part of Resitor Group in 2023.
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Basel Biennale aims to cast light on the many artworks that exist in public places in Basel, but often stay unnoticed. The first two Basel Biennales have been dedicated to them. But Basel’s public space also features artworks that are almost impossible to miss – and these are this year’s protagonists. But even the most popular artworks need care. That’s why the Basel Biennale also aims to raise awareness for preserving these works of art. Some of them need regular maintenance, some of them need to be repaired, so giving them continued love and respect is desired.

The artists: Jonathan Borofsky, Bettina Eichin, Fischli/Weiss, René Küng, Lang/Baumann, Pablo Picasso, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Ferdinand Schlöth, Thomas Schütte, Richard Serra, Paul Suter, Jean Tinguely, Alexander Zschokke.

Here’s the map (video documentary coming soon):

Vollbildanzeige

Impressions from the opening reception of Jennifer Rubell‘s solo exhibition at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York. New York, June 4, 2026. The exhibition revolves around Jennifer Rubell’s new AI-based smartphone app Attune. Attune is an AI-powered smartphone app that helps users before they send a text message. It’s both a consumer product and a conceptual art project. How it works: You enter your draft text — the message you’re about to send. Attune analyzes it — It identifies the underlying “social move” you might not realize you’re making (e.g., hesitation, vagueness, weakness, unintended subtext, or self-sabotage).
It rewrites the message — in your own voice, making it clearer, sharper, more confident, and better aligned with your actual intentions.
The app essentially acts like a thoughtful friend (with a bit of “tough love”) that spots how you might be getting in your own way and helps you communicate more effectively. It targets the anxious “moment before you press send.”

Press text (excerpt): Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of artist Jennifer Rubell’s new AI texting app, Attune, on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026 from 6–8pm at 327 West 36th Street, New York.

Attune is a mass-market smartphone app for the moment before you send a text. It identifies the social move you may not realize you’re making, then rewrites your message in your own voice, clearer, sharper, and more attuned to your intentions. In the gallery space, Attune invites viewers to reconsider what art is and what a gallery does. How does art survive the collapse of old structures of transaction, objecthood, and human experience? Rubell uses the mechanics of a tech product launch as medium: exclusivity, desperation, virality, male ease, and hype are all fair game.

Attune appears as the subject of three new artworks by Rubell: Baller is an exuberant sendup of neo-macho startup culture. Thousands of beach balls hand-stamped with the Attune logo fill the gallery space. 250 are limited-edition collectors’ items signed by Rubell. One beach ball grants lifetime access to Attune. The work blurs the line between merch and collectible. Visitors are invited to take home as many free balls as they can carry. Young Man with Phone is a live month-long performance featuring a hunched-over twenty-something, endlessly absorbed in his device: the archetypal male figure of our time. The performer’s number appears on the wall label, where visitors are invited to hit him up. He responds if he feels like it. He uses Attune when he feels hesitant. Free for a Month is an oil-on-canvas diptych that includes a QR code granting gallery-goers 30 days of complimentary access to Attune.

The exhibition will remain on view through June 26. Attune will launch in limited release on the App Store beginning June 3, 2026. Subscriptions start at $12.99/month. Join the waitlist at attuneofficial.com.

Jennifer Rubell (b. 1970) is an American conceptual artist whose work centers on the viewer’s physical and emotional engagement with the object. She works across a wide variety of participatory mediums ranging from interactive sculpture, painting, and video to food performance. Select performances and exhibitions include Landscapes at Fondation Beyeler; Old-Fashioned at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Creation for Performa; Made in Texas and Nutcrackers at Dallas Contemporary; So Sorry at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery; The de Pury Diptych at Saatchi Gallery; and Icons at Brooklyn Museum. Rubell received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She lives and works in New York City. This is her fourth exhibition with Meredith Rosen.