Aram Bartholl is a conceptual artist whose work uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and with public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies.

Bartholl addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy, and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings. The effect is twofold. The works create an at-times bizarre confrontation with our own ignorance of globally active platform capitalism, and they renegotiate network activities as political forms of participation on an analog level using the potential of public space.

Bartholl thus initiates a performative process to catalyze a renewed understanding of individual action within a collective and self-determined network discourse. Conceptually and technically, he uses the same aesthetics, codes, and communication patterns that users are familiar with from YouTube, Instagram, and video games. A purposeful contextualization employs the logic of the Internet while at the same time undermining it with individual strategies.

Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Thailand Biennale, among others as well as conducting countless workshops, talks, and performances internationally.

Bartholl is a professor of art with digital media at HAW Hamburg; he lives and works in Berlin.

He was also a member of the Internet-based Free Art and Technology Lab, a.k.a. F.A.T. Lab, founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly from 2009 until its discontinuation in 2015