MEANWHILE is thrilled to present Tourist in Interface, an exhibition by Mya Cole.

By using the internet as a tool to explore land and heritage, Tourist in Interface, looks at the use of social media and online forums to project an idealised image of Western and Westernised people experiencing non-Western cultures.

Bodies can be made invisible in favour of another, changing the power dynamic between two people, and on a larger scale, two cultures. This multimedia exhibition explores this dynamic between white content creators and their imagined neutrality in a non-white environment. Tourists and expats document their lives through an interface, sharing their experiences on YouTube and other social media platforms. Eerily producing a form of contemporary colonisation, that focuses on self-promotion and advertisements. Online forums also have the ability to bridge gaps of physical distance to lands of one's heritage, that ultimately create an image of an individualised homeland. A land that is not steeped in history and culture, but loosely built through specific Google searches and stories filled with vague and potentially obscured memories heard through the experience of living in diaspora. Forming an image of homeland can be a colonial practice built on illusion - pouring forth an oily substance that we can slip on. The video works use footage found online to reflect the experience of gathering knowledge and subverting it. Through the use of text, material and moving-image works. Tourist in Interface investigates the idea of imagined utopias and the internet’s influence on two distinct relationships with colonisation.

Opening 5:30 p.m. Wednesday 7 August



About the artist:

Mya Cole is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is one of the current curators at Window Gallery. Recent performance works include Wellness Analysis Techniques Limited and Whispers. Her practice is interested in interrogating the continuation of colonial praxis in its varied forms across technology, spaces and physicality.