Mikala Hyldig Dal is an artist and curator working with new media and performance. She explores political cultures through emerging technologies and collective interventions. Her work integrates critical theory into immersive digital environments, challenging dominant power structures from an intersectional perspective. Her practice involves augmented reality, virtual reality, animation, and artificial intelligence. She approaches virtual space as an opportunity to contest, undo, and rethink historical markers set in stone, turning collective memory into a fluid, ephemeral, and critically discursive space. Combining elements from speculative history, science fiction, and mythology, her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 12th Berlin Biennale, 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. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as TAZ, The Guardian, and Monopol Magazine. She is the editor of Cairo: Images of Transition (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), a book based on a research project on art and activism during the Arab uprisings. In 2018, she co-founded the queer-feminist artist collective Maternal Fantasies, which addresses the politics of care work and the representation of motherhood(s) in and beyond the arts. In 2019, she initiated the event series Open/Occupy Flutgraben to develop artistic strategies against the ongoing gentrification of Berlin. In 2022, in collaboration with programmer Farhan Khalid, she created the augmented reality app Monuments AR for site-specific interventions in digital space, focusing on decolonial interventions. Mikala Hyldig Dal is a graduate of the University of Arts Berlin, Class of 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. The artist 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 deconstructs "aesthetic regimes" with her artistic works, curatorial projects, and theoretical reflections.