Simóndi Gallery is pleased to host the third edition of Post Scriptum, the format that launches its exhibition season every September. The group exhibition Thresholds of Control, curated by the gallery in collaboration with Eva Frapiccini, offers an urgent and layered investigation of the age of technocracy, where power is structured through algorithms, control systems, and automated narratives. In a context dominated by the opacity of technologies and responsibility has been entrusted to artificial intelligences, the works on display open up spaces for critical reflection, questioning how dreams, bodies, memories and desires are collected, archived, manipulated, and disciplined.
Eva Frapiccini, Rana Hamadeh, and Pınar Öğrenci evoke a suspended atmosphere, staging a subtle yet scathing critique of the technocratic rationality that permeates our age . At the same time, they reflect on the inequalities that shape contemporary society where dreams and desires are not within everyone’s equitable reach and bear different weight and proportions depending on the social context in which you are born and live. Frapiccini, Hamadeh, and Öğrenci reject the logic of technofeudal control, where subjectivity and desires are instrumentalized for domination and profit. Through their works, they activate creative abstraction otherwise—opening it toward complexity, against its capture by automated regimes of simplification and exploitation. Thresholds of Control is an act of resistance: against the total archive, against the ideology of the norm. In an era where technocracy poses as neutrality, this exhibition invites us to rediscover the value of doubt, deviance, and dreaming.
The sound installation Dreamscape is the result of the research begun by Eva Frapiccini with the participatory project Dreams' Time Capsule (2011–2022), which collected more than two thousand dream recordings from different parts of the world as intimate confessions of desires, fears, and memories. In the exhibition, the two interactive speakers of Dreamscape (2023) show how the dream, through the voices of those who recount it, becomes as well an act of resistance against data colonization. In a technocratic society, where every aspect of life is quantified and reduced to analyzable patterns for commercial purposes, Frapiccini asserts the unique value of what is unfathomable and subjective. Beyond creating an archive of dreams, the artist recreates immersive and poetic environments, where the viewers connect with both their own spiritual sphere as well as with that of other people, thus generating a collective narrative in which everyone can recognize themselves. In this sense, Dreamscape functions as a counter-archive in this digital age of ours, a space of opacity that resists the mandatory transparency of digital governance.
Standard Deviation I (2021) by Rana Hamadeh is presented as a multimedia composition that merges text, image, and sound into a complex system of layered meanings. It is a single-channel 3D animation, inspired by the aesthetics of 3D epic gaming aesthetics as well as 2D games from the 1980s. The work conducts a reading of the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex, and thinks through what constitutes a contemporary theorisation of tragedy. The acts in the work unfold in disturbing, dreamlike and hectic settings, and draw a surreal mapping of the original play’s emotional intensities and journeys of grief, the crescendos and diminuendos of the play’s strains and anxieties, its dramatic tension, sequence of characterisation, temporal and psychological entanglements.
The video examines the tragedy’s inner workings as a machine – an extended ‘technology of endurance’.
Rana Hamadeh not only suggests the concept of deviation from the norm but also the necessity of sabotaging the infrastructures that claim to define it. Here technocracy is laid bare in its disciplinary devices, but also dismantled and rewritten through a baroque aesthetic that subverts its logics.
Pinar Öğrenci explores the historical and material stratification of oppression, focusing on migratory movements, war, and the collective memories of trauma. Through a multidisciplinary approach, her research connects everyday and collective stories of state violence, social movements, and urban and industrial transformations.
Un Peso (2018) tells the story of the children of Acapulco, Mexico, who dive into the sea to pick up the coins thrown by tourists. The fading memory of the city’s splendor in the 1950s and 1960s is overshadowed by the current situation, marked by the presence of Guerrero’s drug cartels, chronicles of violence, and stories of young women and men who have disappeared or been killed. The children filmed by the artist, are sons of fishermen migrated from Costa Chica, who survive by collecting coins from Acapulco’s sea, plunge into the depths of the water and resurface, tracing a hypnotic dance that seems to dispel the widespread violence and economic inequalities of the city.
Un Peso – whose title plays with the double meaning of the word as both weight and the Mexican local currency – is both a physical and political metaphor: it denounces the dehumanizing automatism of biometric systems and algorithmic border policies which classify, reject and eliminate human lives. While this logic, Öğrenci propounds a poetics of matter and testimony in which felt rather than measurable weight , becomes profoundly human.
