The French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa on show in Milan with “Digital Mourning” curated by Roberta Tenconi. After Trisha Baga and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Pirelli HangarBicocca continues the research path among  new aspecs of video and digital art, tracing the contemporary ranks through artists who have made cutting-edge devices their own form of discussion and experimentation.

In 2014 Art had already predicted a Pandemic outbreak and the digital human response, with an Artwork/TV series. This is how Neïl Beloufa welcomes us to his first Italian monographic exhibition. The Screen Talk interactive installation opens the show and invites the audience to choose which premonitory episode to watch in the maxi screen just in front of him.
Beloufa is a digital flâneur able to create technologically complex installations where current communication and relational dynamics emerge, he’s interested in web world, social media, video games esthetics and reality TV formats. He uses a typical digital information age vocabulary to shows its own paradoxes, conventions and habits.
And smoke, psychedelic lights, mirror balls, video games and digital carousel, the space where artist works comes alive, with a body, and it requires us to participate, wanting to activate every spectator-user gesture as well as thought. A large 3D chat is set up between hangar aisles, against the background one of his film sets ruins. Three "hosts" voice-overs accompany the viewer within a path that finds the artist from the beginning (Kempinski, 2007) up to the latest site-specific installations. Indeed, three spirit guides lead the game on display, organizing and disorganizing the experience, simulating hypothetical subdued authoritarian figures, as algorithms on the Internet.
The constant exposure to and with digital interaction on stage makes another Doomscrolling impossible. And this is what the author hopes for; an awareness over these essential works that reproduce our everyday gestures, out-of-context, forced, to open the door of critical and conscious thought. Hic et Nunc of digital reproduction, an art work to be completed with fruition, and if you get bored just take a photo, follow Beloufa instructions and post it on Instagram, with tag of course.
A monographic exhibition where the artist wanted to create a contemporary world fresco, where digital marks human interactions without eliminating them, indeed essential, as in the last work on show “La morale de l’histoire”. 
To the question about his next project he says “my children…”.

On the following link an artwork created for Screen Talk Museum 2020 project, where you can play as in an online videogame.

Neïl Beloufa “Digital Mourning” curated by Roberta Tenconi, on show at Pirelli HangarBicocca until 18 July 2021.