CRYING ON THE INTERNET
(postponed DIAP MFA 2024 Thesis exhibition)
Featuring: Lola Libre, Fatima Sabeekah, Wenjun Chen, Robert Duarte-Rivera
January 11 – January 25, 2025
Gallery Hours:
Friday – Sunday, 1 pm – 6 pm
And by appointment
Reception: Saturday, January 11, 6 pm – 8 pm
PS122 Gallery
150 1st Ave
New York, NY 10009

“crying on the Internet” is an immersive exhibition featuring four multidisciplinary artists who explore the interplay between the digital and physical realms, personal identity, socio-political dynamics, and the profound depths of human emotion. Through various media, including virtual reality, interactive installations, performances, and sculptural forms, the exhibition invites visitors to traverse the boundaries between technology, self, and society.

Wenjun Chen, Tiffany Zorrilla “Lola Libre,” Robert Duarte Rivera, and Fatima Sabeekah —explore themes of identity, belonging, and the human condition through their distinct artistic practices. This exhibition delves into the multifaceted nature of identity in the digital age, the intersection of personal and political narratives, and the profound emotional landscapes of loss and memory.

Artists and Works

Wenjun Chen
Aliens of Me is a self-exploration based on my personal data with internet-based technologies, utilizing the web, video, virtual reality, and installation. I am using keywords from my memories shared online and figures of my health data captured by my smartwatch to reconstruct myself through virtual avatars, a story of my growth, and new bodies in which to hold these avatars and stories. This also reflects my identity as a newcomer from China, migrating to an open new world that blends analog and digital.
We are generating more and more digital data, and virtual life is becoming increasingly dominant. Personal identities are becoming interchangeable and indistinguishable between the virtual and real worlds. Through this work, I explore the inter-transformative relationship between the real and the virtual, the tangible and the intangible, the material and the immaterial, and the thing and the non-thing.
Meanwhile, technology is also extending its tendrils into the most personal spheres of humans, commoditizing personal data as a lucrative venture. I aim to engage in the claiming of sovereignty over our personal data, creating a space where personal data transcends commercial value and morphs into a playground for self-reflection, artistic expression, creativity, and exploration.
This work was initiated on GitHub and developed into a narrative video, virtual reality, WebXR, and installation. 

Lola Libre
All or Nothing explores dissociative feminism, a coping mechanism characterized by apathy and emotional detachment in response to the weight of systemic gender oppression. Blurring the line between self-protection and surrender, the works question whether disengagement offers solace or signals a quiet capitulation to societal inequities. Employing a range of mediums, including performance, installation, mixed media, and image-based works, the pieces confront the complexities of this emotional state, blending personal and collective narratives to unravel its implications.
Central to the exhibition are AI-generated, doomsday-inspired visuals that examine themes of socio-political instability, economic uncertainty, and pervasive hopelessness. Integrating AI as a collaborator amplifies detachment’s unsettling and impersonal qualities, offering a lens to reflect on feminism and resilience in the modern era. The work evokes a world where identity and agency feel distant and fragmented through stark contrasts in textures and surreal, fractured imagery. This body of work invites audiences to consider their own thresholds for apathy and despair, posing the critical question: Does dissociative feminism represent a survival strategy or a surrender to a dystopian reality?

Robert Duarte-Rivera
PLANAR FOCI is a series of works that examines the cascading material and sociopolitical relationships between territoriality, surveillance, history, and language. The works in PLANAR FOCI consider how these elements of lived experience converge into a dynamic of tensions between control and care, exploring how this dissonance informs our use of space and the possibilities we consider for it.
The works in PLANAR FOCI are composed primarily of found and modified objects and materials. The production methods for the works stem from an underlying material philosophy of “rasquachismo,” the transformation of found and discarded objects into new forms, an interweaving of disparate histories into a shared future.

Fatima Sabeekah
Voided Realms explores the intensity of solitary emotions. It caters to the feelings of loss, emptiness, and absence of the physical body after the death of a loved one. The research in this project revolves around the philosophical and psychological understanding of emotional voids through a subjective experience. Voided Realms contains two sets of work: ‘Contemplation Shrines’, a series of multiple sculptural forms executed as an auditory installation, and افسوس,‘Afsos’, a self-reflecting performance piece, exploring the expression of grief. افسوس (Afsos) is derived from Urdu language meaning sorrow, regret, and grief. This work navigates the meaning of  افسوس (Afsos) while mourning and the weight it carries when used in Grief.