This exhibition is a charged and sensitive visual diary that describes the artist’s journey through the IMVU virtual world. IMVU is a digital platform for creating characters, identities and alternative communities that are often pornographic. As a child Moatty played in this metaverse and created imaginary characters based on sexual fantasies and images of passion. As an adult she returns to this world to document it. For the first time she creates a character that resembles herself – a “real” body, fleshy, undisciplined – thus setting in motion a series of collisions with stereotypes of beauty, gender and oppressive social norms in a space that is ostensibly free and imaginative.
To create a character that reflects her own body with all its imperfections, among them cellulite, red hair, fingernails and curves, the artist portrays a “virtual prostitute” asking for “gifts”, thus collecting the components needed to create a personal avatar. When she ultimately appears “as she is”, she experiences rejection: chat rooms are closed to her, she is expelled from community meetings and is asked to change her appearance in order to belong. The envisioned virtual ideal is exposed as shallow and superficial, driven by stereotypical images of beauty, intolerant of deviation or individuality.
The video works in the exhibition depict intimate moments of presence and contemplation: Moatty sitting on a cliff, looking at the water, moving gently, and often encountering ghostly entities known as NPCs – non-playable characters who are not controlled by a human player but rather act according to a set of commands dictated in advance by the programmer. These characters are designed to serve the narrative, decorate the environment or carry out predetermined actions, but are never truly active subjects. These characters lack agency and are a symbolic reflection of the artist’s isolation and absence of control over the space she should be controlling. Thus she herself becomes an NPC – a character that wanders through a world in which she is invisible and has no influence over her environment.
Moatty’s work exposes the gender, social and technological boundaries that profess to be neutral and positions the female body as the site of struggle, rejection and inner reflection. In a world in which even one’s own avatar must fight for space, existence and love, the ability to feel present, visible and included has become a privilege.
Nitsan Shuval Abiri
Exhibition Curator
