Tezos

A 48 year old Brazilian woman

Creator

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Description

For the past three years, I have engaged with commercial text-to-image AI programs, confronting their strong bias in representing women: they are almost always white, young, slim, and conventionally beautiful. The vast majority of AI-generated images circulating online and on social media fail to challenge these stereotypes, reinforcing structural racism and the invisibility of overweight, middle-aged, non-white women like myself. By using a description of myself as a prompt, I find myself in a battle—against both the algorithms and the humans behind the biases of Midjourney, one of the most widely used text-to-image tools. These many synthetic versions of me “look at the camera”—at the viewer—reclaiming the right to the existence of their image. ____ Video made for the exhibition THE SECOND-GUESS. BODY ANXIETY IN THE AGE OF AI , curated by Anika Meier, Margaret Murphy and Leah Schrager, and showcased on virtual.hek.ch (HEK Basel) in March 2025. ___ Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker, and independent curator based in Brussels since 2014. She is interested in the space between what we understand as reality and fiction. Using video and new technologies as tools, she proposes experiences that question the narratives we create about the world and about ourselves. She holds a degree in Film Studies from the University of São Paulo and a Master of Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK). Kika Nicolela has received several international awards and grants. She has participated in hundreds of exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including the Kunst Film Biennale (Germany), the Biennale of Moving Image (Argentina), the Biennale of Mercosur (Brazil), and the Video and Media Arts Biennale (Chile). The artist is represented by Galerie Charlot (Paris/Tel Aviv). Since early 2022, she has been exploring blockchain as a creator, collector, and curator of NFTs. Her works are part of the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art of Salvador, the Itaú Cultural Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Casoria, the National Library of France, Paço das Artes, and the Tezos Foundation, as well as numerous private collections worldwide. Her videos are distributed by Vtape (CA), GIV (CA) and Heure Exquise! (FR). She is represented by the Galerie Charlot (Paris/Tel Aviv).

Traits