Mikala Hyldig Dal is an artist and curator specializing in new media and performance. Her work critically engages with political cultures through emerging technologies and collective interventions. Integrating critical theory into immersive digital environments, she challenges dominant power structures from intersectional perspectives. Her practice spans augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, using virtual spaces as platforms to contest, deconstruct, and rethink historical narratives. In her work, collective memory transforms into a fluid, ephemeral, and critically discursive medium.
Fusing elements of speculative history, science fiction, and mythology, her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the 12th Berlin Biennial, Martin Gropius Bau, HKW Berlin, Townhouse Gallery Cairo, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, Flux Factory New York, and Azad Gallery Tehran. It has been reviewed in leading publications, including TAZ, The Guardian, and Monopol Magazine.
In 2011, she initiated the research project Images of Transition, exploring art and activism during the Arab Spring. In 2018, she co-founded the queer-feminist artist collective Maternal Fantasies, which addresses the politics of care work and representations of motherhood(s) within and beyond the arts. In 2022, in collaboration with programmer Farhan Khalid, she launched Monuments AR, an augmented reality app designed for site-specific interventions in digital space, with a focus on decolonial perspectives.
Her teaching curricula, developed for international universities, and her publishing practice delve into the intersections of technology, art, and socio-political systems, critically examining how emerging technologies shape power dynamics and collective futures.
Mikala Hyldig Dal is a graduate of the University of the Arts Berlin, where she specialized in Media Art.
Introduction by Prof. Dr. Linda Hentschel at Institute for Art and Visual History (IKB), Humboldt University of Berlin:
Mikala Hyldig Dal is an artist, curator, and author based in Berlin, Cairo, and The Hague. She engages in what I would call artistic research in the best sense of the term, exploring visual cultures through visually-designed and text-based interventions. Many of her works are video-based installations, but she also incorporates performance, drawing, and painting into her artistic practices. her work has been featured in international exhibitions, including Martin Gropius Bau, Cairo Townhouse Gallery, Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, and House of World Cultures Berlin. Mikala Hyldig Dal is particularly interested in the connections between image production and image destruction (iconoclasm), processes of visibility and invisibility, power dynamics, and inequalities in the field of the visual. Or, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it: Mikala Hyldig Dal deconstructs "aesthetic regimes" with her artistic works, curatorial projects, and theoretical reflections.