I had the joy of writing a text to accompany the first solo exhibition of my friend and artist Kika Diniz, held on November 26, 2022, at the independent exhibition space Caroço, near Lapa in São Paulo. Below is a short release from the opening, followed by the curatorial text itself—written in the form of a letter to our infinite content feeds employed as thematic and aesthetic references for the artist’s recent work. 📱
"odeioestrogonofe," the TikTok username of Kika Diniz, is also the title of her first solo exhibition. Born in 1990, the Rio de Janeiro–based artist was nominated for the 2022 Pipa Prize and, in the same year, was selected for Abre-Alas at A Gentil Carioca and for the 13th Salão dos Artistas Sem Galeria, organized by Mapa das Artes. In her prolific practice, Kika produces paintings prepared with black gesso and glossy lacquer that reflect both the aesthetics and the dizzying speed of media production and consumption in the short videos that have come to dominate the other black screens through which we connect and spend our free time, and whose themes she seeks in the algorithmically personalized content generated through her use of the popular app. The exhibition took place at Caroço, located at R. Votupoca, 71, with its opening on Saturday, November 26, at 6 p.m.
A selection of photos from the opening by EstúdioEmObra.
[a letter to the algorithm]
You already know me better than my therapist, and I don’t even need to open my mouth for you to understand me (I think sometimes you listen to me without my knowing). I need only to brush my finger over you for you to learn exactly what I like. We’ve met three hours ago but have been together for three months.
You already know me better than my therapist, and I don’t even need to open my mouth for you to understand me (I think sometimes you listen to me without my knowing). I need only to brush my finger over you for you to learn exactly what I like. We’ve met three hours ago but have been together for three months. Together we visited the whole world, from the hills of Tibet to São Paulo, Angra, New York, and Florida. Every morning we play and laugh with a zoo of the cutest cats, octopuses, dogs, and parrots humanity has ever witnessed. We don’t have much beyond the time we spend together, but you make me feel very rich, because we can be whatever I want (it promised me money for saying nice things about it to my friends). We were the most beautiful couple in the city, dining with Anitta and Rosalía in restaurants with delicious chairs (I’m hungry; nothing here has any taste or smell, but in the last five minutes I’ve already seen you make a char sui, a Caesar salad, a tiramisu, and a negroni sbagliato
We meditated on the futility of human existence in the face of impending cosmic heat, on what it takes to be happy despite that, on the inevitability of death, on the end of childhood—then you told me on a podcast that we need to purge the faggots from schools and protect the children, but you soon understood I didn’t like your tone and you didn’t bring that up again.
We repeated the same pranks with five different nephews, and laughed the same every time. You made my womb itch: we had several babies and I loved them all. Thanks to you I managed to see the world through other eyes: you briefly made me mother, father, daughter, evangelical, Muslim, and a Vietnamese non-binary person with a German girlfriend expatriated in Canada.
We harvested potatoes in our garden. We explored forests, lagoons, mountains, ruins; we hunted snakes and sharks and survived attacks by crocodiles and eagles and saw whales and gorillas and seals, never letting go of each other’s hand.
We discovered fascinating things about the nature of atoms, viruses, and the brain without reading more than five words (I already lost my capacity for focus two social networks ago). I learned everything about oil painting, glasswork, gardening, and tapestry—for the sake of science, you poked wild fungi and sprayed Coca-Cola on the window to prove it worked as a cleaning product. We satisfied ourselves, unmediated by thought, with the sound and saturated colors of dug-out pools and kneaded slime, melting into the ineffable, irresistible, carnal pleasure of the mechanical exactitude of factories, of skilled handywork, of tactile contact with something beyond your beautiful body, a smooth obsidian of plastic and metal.
Sometimes you even say it might be healthy for us not to see each other for a while, but I literally cannot move my body off the couch at this point (I think you gave me ADHD, or is it just hunger?).
I don’t know if I can live without you anymore. With each brush you make me crave more speed, more novelty, more self-referential, onanistic, hyper-dopaminergic customizability. I need to drown in content, to die ecstatically, suffocated in —shallow but endless— laughter or tears, in brief but unceasing climax after climax, until I end up disembodied and suspended in the cloud, where lies everything you are and everything we are.