Mikala Hyldig Dal operates at the intersection of new media, performance, and political intervention, where digital technologies are not treated as transparent tools but as volatile arenas shaped by histories, ideologies, and contested imaginaries. Her artistic practice traverses augmented reality, virtual environments, and artificial intelligence—mediums she activates not to replicate the world as it is, but to expose how it has been constructed and to imagine how it could be otherwise. Her work unfolds through collective processes that foreground care, resistance, and counter-memory. In this shared terrain, digital space becomes insurgent ground: an architecture of refusal, revision, and possibility.
Hyldig Dal’s projects treat virtuality not as a medium for simulation, but as a condition for speculative world-building. Her digital interventions construct counter-realities—ephemeral and critically engaged spaces that unsettle the authority of dominant narratives. These spaces do not merely reflect political realities; they reconfigure them through the lenses of feminist critique, decolonial praxis, and technological poetics. Working across speculative history, science fiction, and mythology, she reclaims the digital as both an archaeological and visionary tool—excavating buried truths while scripting alternative futures.
Her work has been presented at the Berlin Biennale, Berlinale, Haus of World Cultures, Gropius Bau, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Townhouse Gallery Cairo, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Berlin Art Week, Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, Azad Gallery Tehran, Flux Factory New York, and the European Media Art Festival. Across these contexts, her installations, performances, and virtual environments interrogate the infrastructures of memory, governance, and representation. Reviews in outlets such as TAZ, The Guardian, and Monopol Magazine have situated her practice within urgent discourses on postdigital aesthetics, political resistance, and the reimagination of public space.
In 2011, she initiated Images of Transition, a long-term research and artistic project that traces the evolving visual regimes of the “Arab Spring”, particularly the Egyptian revolution. Drawing from lived experience and media-activist archives, the project examines how grassroots image-making, urban occupation, and transnational solidarity helped forge a new visual language of dissent. This inquiry into the politics of visibility, documentation, and propaganda has informed her broader practice ever since.
In 2018, Hyldig Dal co-founded Maternal Fantasies, a queer-feminist artist collective that critically explores the intersections of motherhood, care work, and collective artistic production. Through film, performance, and publishing, the collective reclaims maternal subjectivities as complex, radical, and unfinished processes—expanding the politics of care beyond biological or domestic confines.
Since 2019, she has collaborated with programmer Farhan Khalid on Monuments AR, an augmented reality platform for site-specific digital interventions that unearth suppressed histories and propose decolonial counter-memories. The project challenges the monument as a fixed, patriarchal form, reimagining it as a living, interactive, and polyphonic medium—accessible through mobile technologies, activated in dialogue with communities, and grounded in context-specific research.
Her publishing and pedagogical work—developed in partnership with international institutions and universities—extends her artistic inquiries into critical discourse. She investigates how emerging technologies structure access, perception, and participation, and how they shape our collective imagination of the future. Whether through augmented monuments or speculative lectures, her work constructs architectures for critical engagement: spaces for rethinking the past, inhabiting the present, and envisioning alternative futures.
CONTACT mikala [dot] hyldig [dot] dal [at] gmail [dot] com