Sondra Perry
phantom. menace.
2023
HD video, color, sound
3:29 min

March 15 – April 28, 2024
(Schaufenster am Hofgarten & online)


In her video phantom. menace., artist Sondra Perry utilizes the latest AI technology to conjure the past as a ghostly presence, thus reflecting upon identity, artistic production, and the immediacy of history.

“Two African American men, one in his 50s and one in his late 20s, stand in the middle of a crowded barber shop and shake hands.” Perry has given this instruction to the AI, alongside images and videos from her recent show at her New York gallery Bridget Donahue on 99 Bowery, where phantom. menace. was on view for the first time. Introduced as “SP’s Phantom Zone” and paced to a house remix, the same scene of a joyous encounter replays in different versions and contexts throughout the video.

The instructed habitual greeting between the two men dissolves menacingly in the moment of mutual contact; illustrated through the AI, their faces blur just before they could become recognizable as subjects–somewhat reminiscent of attempting to recapitulate a scene from a (recurring) dream. Perry links these fictional scenes with real locations: in the first scene, we see the artist passing by a sculpture in the form of a barber chair, displayed at her gallery Bridget Donahue. The chair was originally installed at Perry’s Newark studio, a former barber shop. The gallery space featured in the video slowly transforms into different kinds of generated barber shops where the aforementioned encounters begin to unfold. At the end of the clip, the salon transforms back into the exhibition space.

For phantom. menace., Perry outsources part of the artistic production to AI and uses this new technology to imagine fragments of the past in the present while at the same time critically reflecting on the site of memory: the art gallery as a place for social gatherings is transformed into a barber shop, another yet very different example of a social meeting place, and back again. Moreover, the artist questions the bias towards the technologies she employs and whether they are in fact all that ‘new’: “Sometimes I think about how new technologies are just reconfigurations of a certain politic, of a certain way that we think of seeing those types of things.” [1] In this way, Perry perhaps alludes to certain phantoms of gender, race, and age that are (re)produced by AI in order to have them dissolve again in the moment of their manifestation.