run_it_back.exeˇ
Image © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
run_it_back.exeˇ, by the New York based artist Avery Singer, kicks off Serralves Museum’s 2025 exhibition season. Commissioned exclusively for this setting, the exhibition grapples with the dilemmas of the digital era and the systematic tensions that plague contemporary society, as it winds from the museum’s Central Gallery to the lobby.
Following more than a year of research, Singer leads us on a journey into the emerging digital economies — cryptocurrency being one — while laying bare the alienating volatility and fragmentation of identity at their core.
Emerging in a haze, in this series of paintings hanging on tubular structures, we see the faces of enigmatic, almost ethereal figures. They are young, their youthfulness frozen in time, bearing the accessories and tropes of a constructed identity – piercings, sunglasses, tinted hair – in portraits of online gamers and crypto-investors. A lonely, silent space is their home, hovering somewhere between two worlds: the real and the digital. The meticulously-staged architecture that surrounds them, reminds us of the characterless interiors of financial institutions, or public offices — impersonal environments where we become disposable pawns in a colossal system.
Singer places two apparently irreconcilable worlds side-by-side — the emerging digital market of crypto-assets and decentralised economies, and the traditional financial system. By juxtaposing these realities, the artist calls attention to the mechanisms which sustain them and to how they both affect our social and economic reality.
Avery Singer, one of the most exceptional painters working today, with her critical eye and unique sensibility alerts us to the cracks in a world in constant upheaval. run_it_back.exeˇ is more than just an exhibition; it is an urgent call for reflection on the impact of technology on our lives, as well as the challenges and quirks of an increasingly digital, and impersonal society.
run_it_back.exeˇ is organized by the Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and curated by Inês Grosso, chief curator of the Serralves Museum.
The exhibition is supported by Hauser & Wirth Gallery.