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With ESCAPISM, Oyoun opens a platform for an artistic and sociocritical experiment, connecting virtual and physical spaces. In an interactive exhibition at Oyoun Berlin from December 3 to 24, viewers can experience 4 hybrid game installations created by ESCAPISM artists: tarare by téa boyarchuk, Thicker Than Blood Digital by Izdihar Afyouni, Guacuco by Sol Martínez-Solé and Embryonic Babies of Hot Winters by Avita Maheen.

In a process of collective learning the artists of ESCAPISM developed their explorative visions into four hybrid games. Artists concretized their ideas in digital as well as physical spheres through exchanges, workshops and collaboration with fellow artists, programmers, technicians and mentors.

The artists are based in different parts of the online and offline worlds and the largest part of the development and production process has been enabled through a remote, digital communication - which makes ESCAPISM hybrid and experimental in its essence.

These four projects in game form present personal and collective realities in which the players* are confronted with a series of tasks and challenges: The projects (re-)create personal and collective realities in which players

are required to explore memories and stories
will be unsettled by sensory and aesthetic stimuli
have to reflect on their standings within the current systems
must confront the social and state mechanism of oppression;
are required to resist, deconstruct, liberate and heal.
The four projects engage themselves in the intersection of the intimate and the structural. They point to the colliding moments between realities and imaginations. The medium - a computer game played in an immersive physical environment - likewise manifests such intersection, where the individual players constitute the broader network of gamified experience of these art works.

After a series of development phases that began in May 2021, ESCAPISM will launch as an immersive exhibition with four interactive games which will be online and offline on various platforms of Oyoun.

This project is funded by the Fonds Soziokultur from the program of the BKM "NEUSTART KULTUR"; Brand design by Rita Eperjesi.

Further information about ESCAPISM can be found here.

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About the artists and their projects

téa boyarchuk is a digital image maker based in the Netherlands whose work deals with digital belonging, unseen structures, and online ubiquity of imagery. With the project ‘tarare’, téa presents a linear, narrative based game that leads the audience through the destructive domains of colourism, texturism and anti-blackness. It is an open invitation to think about overconsumption and eurocentric beauty standards - and to consider the conditions and the cost of true and earnest self-love.

Izdihar Afyouni is a Palestinian-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist, curator and activist. She works with large-format painting, sculpture, text, video and participatory performance and ritual. Her current research-based artwork seeks to curate and interrogate intersections between affective technologies, occultism, biopolitics and sexual dissidence. Her curatorial practice is concerned with making the usually unpublicized workings of government public by queering bodily subjectivity, the erotics of violence and the biosurveillant measures of weeding out genetic and undesirable threats to the state. She is the creator and curator of the ongoing research project and immersive exhibition series “Thicker Than Blood”.

“Thicker Than Blood Digital” is an immersive installation and interactive digital artwork that interrogates the abuse of language and affective technologies by state mechanisms - and how we allow ourselves to become complicit in justifying and reproducing state violence.

Sol Martínez-Solé is a queer transmasc multidisciplinary artist from Venezuela. They create art to explore their emotions and their memory through bold colors and stylized shapes, and particularly in 3D they search for ways to recreate the sights of their home island. Sol´s project “Guacuco” is a short dream about returning to your home and making space for better things:

“In this small seaside diorama I explore what it means to me to hold onto traumatic memories, and what it feels to re-visit and let go. It's a form of having a conversation with myself about my relationship with my gender, my ethnicity, and the way society has reacted to and shaped my history as I navigate it.”

Avita Maheen is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher born in Bangladesh, based in the Netherlands. She claims to be half-human-half-object and would like to not be perceived. Avita's current project “Embryonic Babies of Hot Winters” is a recollection, assortment and archive of unsettling human to human experiences. It attempts and fails to explore identity with space of existence and sense of belonging in liminality and duality. The project is characterized by storytelling and cinematic experiences and transcends that to both a gamified and a spatial cinematic experience. “Embryonic Babies of Hot Winters” questions a questionable past, present and foreseeable future.