Present Continuous
Curated by Diana Sardaryan
April 16 - 30, 2026
MA Curatorial Practice presents “Present Continuous,” curated by program student Diana Sardaryan. The exhibition brings together artists who explore the fragile and shifting state of being in the now, when reality feels both hyper-visible and strangely out of reach. In the intensity of the present moment, “Present Continuous” reflects on how artists process this reality with empathy, irony, and play.
The exhibition’s focus on human experience in a time of desperate instability is exemplified by the works on view. Dana Dawud, through her AI persona Angelvape.mp3 and the video-poetry Attention is the Greatest Gift, examines how machine-mediated communication amplifies our longing for reassurance, often blurring the line between what we wish to hear and what is real.
Lily Hyon’s installation, This Whole World’s Wild at Heart and Weird on Top, examines the mimicry of intimacy in consumer culture, reclaiming the human traces within fetishized forms. Leonid’s 3D-printed sculpture Humanity presents a mass of identical human figures, echoing Nares’s meditation on sameness and individuality in the age of algorithmic identity.
Zein Majali’s God Shaped Hole, an AI-generated video, merges pop iconography and cultural critique to interrogate Western progressive stereotypes and neoliberal performances of resistance, exposing the ideological narratives that circulate beneath contemporary left-leaning and anti-establishment discourse.
Naomi Moser’s Watch Me, Watch Me, a documented performance, confronts the suppressed condition of women, revealing what happens when accumulated tension erupts, exposing the heightened sensitivity of the female body and psyche in response to the wild intensity of the present moment.
Zarina Nares’s Boy (1–5), a series of laser-engraved crystal figures, explores the tension between standardization and selfhood in digital culture. The exhibition culminates with Zarina Nares’s REAL FEELINGS, a video installation that reflects on the rise of contemporary spirituality online, moving from the artist’s AI-generated, hallucinatory reflections into appropriated clips of internet psychics and self-proclaimed gurus, observing how spiritual knowledge today appears simultaneously sincere and commodified, intimate and performative, while tracing the fragile balance between belief and simulation in the algorithmic age, without offering a clear resolution.
As part of Present Continuous, two special events will accompany the exhibition. The program includes a performance created by Wonderful Cringe, and directed by James Wyrvicz IS THIS A THEATRE OF LOVE? (or just a hellscape of masks?), which examines mimetic desire and failure within social media performance. Throughout the piece, actors slip between online and offline, repeatedly de/reconstructing their self/collective image, as they attempt to authentically express to each other and to the audience. Within an unstable choreography of exposure and imitation, performers confront the terrifying illegibility of online existence. It is perhaps in failed attempts and distorted translations, however, that we can push through disaffected irony and inaccessible sincerity into some kind of truth through love.
The program also includes a screening of The Code (2024), directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko, a high-concept romantic comedy, exposing the fragility of contemporary relationships and love, and the shifting dynamics of visibility, control, and self-performance. Known for his experimental approach to cinema, Kotlyarenko employs every kind of camera available, from sunglasses and laptops to inexpensive AliExpress and webcam devices, creating a fragmented visual language that blurs private and public, sincerity and spectacle.
The exhibition will conclude with a film screening of RNG (2025) by Reducted Cut. RNG is an ongoing internet-native feature film which Redacted Cut has been using as both protocol and playground: a laboratory for unrestricted abstractions generating constructive and repeatable iterations of expressive and material inferences. Composed from human traces on the internet, it is a portrait of our contemporary condition. Almost two and a half hours of cinematic experience, it marks a new cinema avant-garde of our time.
Present Continuous reflects a generation’s attempt to make sense of a world that often feels beyond comprehension, politically charged, environmentally fragile, and digitally overexposed. Each work, in its own way, searches for tenderness within contradiction. Together, they form a space where uncertainty and tension become shared experiences and the possibility of feeling remains, even in the midst of noise.
