THE CAPITAL O

Tuna Bora

Exhibition by appointment through September 4, 2023

Show Gallery is pleased to present The Capital O, a solo exhibition of new mixed media paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Tuna Bora.

Heavily inspired by McLuhan, Baudrillard defines “hyperreality” as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape. In such a case, neither the representation nor the real remains, just the hyperreal.

As a recently naturalized citizen, Bora studies their place in American society as a dual “fetish object”. Studying the mainstream adult film industry through a verse and queer lens, they find themselves as the object of an outsider’s domination fantasy. This strongly parallels her native culture’s branding by British and French “studies” of Orientalism. Like Ingres, Delacroix and Gérôme who has never seen a single Harem but depicted a  lustful and opulent image to the world, most porn creators of mainstream porn perpetuate a “redesigned” queer hyperreality: an aggressive pastiche filled with borrowed or imagined details, clearly aimed to enable the cultural, social, economic and political domination sought by its purveyors.

Why is this still so effective? Sex work platforms are data brokers that are monetized by self-commodification of the consumer as well as the performer. Categorizing and ranking “appropriate” desires, acts, responses, power systems, and language aside, “free” platforms function as educators, commissioners, and distributors for both sides of the screen: creators, and consumers. In sex therapy, the compulsion is combatted by defining one’s experience level and fantasy persona as separate forces in negotiation. Definition and negotiation allow unscripted play, unlike targeted intermittent reinforcement algorithms. Regardless of sexual orientation, the repetition of the hyperreal reconfigures our dopamine sensors via ASMR. In a world with such strong programming, what implications of satiation need to be re-equalized to make our somatic experiences stand out?

Selected from over 100 digital works painted from porn thumbnails, the artist recreates select pieces into canvas works. They are juxtaposed with their kink-informed poem weaves in their directions to combat disassociation with its viewers’ personal accounts of intimacy. While the poem plays with the contextual duality of hyper desire, the canvases age the algorithmic intimacy in material form.

Tuna Bora (b. Istanbul) is a Turkish-American painter and animation director exploring motion, language, and identity. Known for bringing conceptual aesthetics to mainstream, exploring light phenomenology, and perception in transmedia, their collaborators include Google, Bungie, Dreamworks, Netflix, Nike, Adobe, and Sony. Their innovations have been recognized through many awards including a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal, and the Annie Award for their product design on Pearl, the first VR project nominated for an Academy Award.

Artist, press + artwork inquiries: Margot Ross, margot@show.gallery