Art and economy lately share too much in common.
Perhaps it’s all a rhythm, a pulse repeating itself under different names.

Art and economy no longer observe each other from afar, they mirror, chase, and at times, imitate one another. Both strive to generate value, both attempt to measure desire, both understand failure as a necessary condition for rebirth.

If art history truly moves in cycles, then each era returns disguised: the baroque reborn as advertising, the avant-garde reflected in our feeds, utopia reduced to a startup. Perhaps, by tracing the oscillations of markets and manifestos, we could draw an invisible curve, a graph that doesn’t measure GDP, but the temperature of imagination.

Both pursue unstable equilibriums: inflations of meaning, crises of authenticity, speculations on the future. Yet while one seeks to predict, the other seeks to reveal. And in that gap, a magnetic field opens up, where the aesthetic and the financial attract, blur, and generate new forms of value that cannot be spent, only experienced.

Maybe the flow really exists. Maybe it’s the collective breath that runs through eras and markets, a wave no algorithm can ever fully foresee.
And if we could truly measure it, if we could quantify the heartbeat of art, what would happen then?

Something is about to unfold here (!)
And perhaps, the best is yet to come (?)

At Fakewhale, we’ve long been fascinated by artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives and rewrite established histories. Levi van Gelder’s ongoing project around Ötzi, reimagined as the undead, post-historical drag persona Ötza, is a brilliant and disruptive example of such work. Through layered fan fiction, performance, and video installations, van Gelder gives voice and agency to a body historically dissected and silenced. With wit, irreverence, and emotional depth, Ötza reclaims space as narrator, diva, and theorist. In the following conversation, we delve into the creative origins of the project, the role of humor and embodiment, and what it means to write fiction as a mode of liberation from institutional memory.

Fakewhale: Ötza radically subverts the museological and scientific frameworks that have defined her for decades. No longer a passive object, she emerges as a self-authored subject who resists and rewrites. What first drew you to this idea of reclaiming narrative control through fan fiction and drag?

Levi van Gelder:  I think this subversion and reclamation started with quite a simple gesture toward this mummy, which was quite an intuitive one. I have been quite obsessed with Ötzi since I visited the Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano in 2019 (even before that actually.) It was during the pandemic when I decided I wanted to write fan fiction again, yearning for my prolific years as a teenager writing a 10k chapter every other week about the Hunger Games. As it was such a sterile moment, I needed something generative. Ötzi was still in my mind, and I was rewatching The L Word at the time, so I just decided to write a scene in which Ötzi walked into The Planet during season 2 of The L Word. Ötzi—of course—turned into Ötza, since we’re talking about The L Word and you don’t matter in the show if you’re not a lesbian woman. From there, Ötza kind of took over. Interestingly, just the first chapter was from the POV from someone else: Alice Pieszecki, describing how Ötza walked into the bar/club, long shimmery legs, two humble dangly teeth and barely a nose. (She was also bald at that point.) Every chapter afterwards was from Ötza’s perspective, exploring and crafting her character, identity, desires, fears and dream with every different re-emergence, firstly also in The L Word universe, but quickly she reiterated in different media franchises: The Hunger Games, Sex and the City, Dance Moms, and much more. (…)

The shift from Ötzi to Ötza is more than a change in name or gender. It’s a symbolic transformation that began during the pandemic, a time when our sense of linear time and reality was destabilized. How did that moment shape your relationship to storytelling, embodiment, and the creation of alternate realities?

As I mentioned above, it was an incredibly sterile moment, with very little impetus and input. Maybe it’s the moment where our lives most resembled being in a cooling cell, being frozen in time, maybe the moment where it was the easiest to understand Ötzi’s predicament. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily why it started then. Practically, I think I had the most time reading a lot, and also needed a way to cogitate and translate new ideas. I have found fan fiction to be an amazing way to do exactly that. I am not an academic, but I do love to engage with theory, not only reading it but also reproducing it into new thought. As an artist, flattening out everything I consume, whether it’s Dance Moms or Lacan, into a horizontal field or references to re-appropriate and misconstrued freely, through the hyper-specific lens of Ötza, has been an incredibly rewarding way of understanding my role as a prosumer. I simply think, during covid, my cup hath runneth over if you will, and I needed to write. (…)

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The space at ad/ad – Project Space receives the project with quiet restraint, the lighting is soft, directional, never invasive, the white walls, luminous but not blinding, allow text and image to surface like islands. There is no marked path, we zigzag between works, pause, retrace our steps, stopping where the suspension of language holds us still.

The exhibition unfolds as a current, leaping from loose sheets to wall installations to textual fragments, each element converses with the next, and at times, answers itself. In one corner, a phrase murmurs cautious thoughts, in another, a visual fragment seems to crack, questioning its own reflection. The works inhabit the space with understated force, free of imposed hierarchies, weaving a fabric of simultaneous presences. The “self” glimmers in the background, not always legible, as a shifting entity refracted through the page.

There is no crowd, no clamor, only a discreet nearness, glances quickening, then slowing. In those secret moments, when someone pauses before a phrase that slips from meaning, we sense the exhibition breathing more deeply. (...)

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On September 11th, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL) opened Skin to Skin, the new solo show by Sandra Mujinga, a portal to a unique parallel world. Conceived as a void, the exhibition room presents itself as a green space, translating the concept of the digital green screen into physical reality. Therefore, entering this space means being transported to another dimension, in which everything is possible and changeable. Inside the green, it feels like being part of the character selection screen of a videogame. Around us are fifty-five identical figures, huge avatars or clones, covered in layers of textile like phantoms without faces. These intimidating sculptures stand still, like they have always been there and will remain there forever, waiting. Alternating their rhythm are cubic or rectangular mirrors. These mirrors open other dimensions, in which we can find ourselves and the phantoms as our doppelgängers. In the background, music gradually appears, rises and then disappears continuously, like a solar cycle.

After all, we look the same, interconnected characters surfing the alternative wave of time.

– Matteo Giovanelli

Matteo Giovanelli: Walking into the Stedelijk’s exhibition room filled with green light, surrounded by statues and mirrors, we are immediately immersed in a space between reality and imagination.  Can you talk about the connection between the green screen and this green space?  How does this relationship open possibilities in your work and allow you to stretch or transform these spectral presences within the exhibition space?

Sandra Mujinga: I feel the green screen is basically a void. Whenever I see a green screen, I always think of complete darkness. Because it’s an empty, interchangeable space. I always think of the green screen as something that could be shifted into anything, so it becomes empty in the sense of potential. I think that’s the possibility the green screen gives to me. When I look at it, it could have been a forest in the background instead of the green color, for instance, or it could have been New York or something else. It’s similar to how we use it digitally, which also grants the possibility of imagining a never-ending world. It becomes a portal. 

MG: Can one say that this is a way to translate the digital or imagined into the physical world?

SM: Yes, I would say that.
MG: Earlier you mentioned you were thinking about sunlight in this installation – can you explain more about that?

SM: I was talking with my friend and thinker Nijah Cunningham who has written about heliology (1) to think through decolonization and he asked, “Is the green light the sun?”, I thought that was an interesting world-building-element. I wanted it to function as a parallel: when you look at that lightened side, you can feel the sun is rising, the moon appears brighter on one side while the background is darker. Through that it became like parallel timelines – there’s this element of sunrise and sunset. Even the sun cycle in itself is about five minutes, and that could become an interesting way to imagine: what if, in this world, days could last five minutes? (…)

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When the ground shifts beneath our feet, it’s rarely due to an earthquake. More often, it’s our gaze that falters, tilting like a camera forcing the horizon line, like a mind teetering between the right move and a nervous collapse. Tilt, the title of Till Bödeker’s exhibition at Coelner Zimmer in Düsseldorf, is more than a technical reference, it’s a state of mind, a psychological gesture. Entering the space feels like stepping into a blind spot of perception, a liminal zone where the real and the simulated flirt with, mimic, and interrupt each other. We are no longer mere viewers, we become players, constantly wagering on the authenticity of what we perceive.

The exhibition opens with a distinct sense of suspension. The room, clinical and precisely staged, is populated by silent, semi-sentient presences: screens broadcasting elusive images, orange machines resting on wooden pallets, industrial robots adorned with ring lights mounted like profane halos. The cold lighting and sterile acoustics evoke a laboratory more than a gallery, and we move through the space with the cautious curiosity of those who fear disrupting a conversation already in progress.

At some point, we found ourselves wondering whether machines, too, feel nostalgia, and if so, for what.

There is no prescribed route, nor does the show pretend to offer one. Vertical images lean against walls in quiet defiance of the classical frame, monitors float mid-air like dislocated windows, and the KUKA robot, choreographed yet never quite tamed, adds a dissonant, almost theatrical rhythm to the experience. Each installation proposes a destabilized point of view, a shift in perception or meaning, an invitation to unlearn what we thought we knew about space, time, and materiality.

One of the images seemed to be chasing its own tail, but perhaps we were the ones circling around it.  (…)

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What strategies does nature offer when war encroaches on every horizon? Can a flower become a monument, a camouflage, a myth? Entering Cemile Sahin’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, we are confronted with a kaleidoscope of contrasts: mountain passes and military bunkers, luxury branding and Kurdish archives, alpine folklore and drone simulations. But nothing here is neutral. Every image, every flicker of sound, is a political act, carefully composed, defiantly poetic.

«BB – BORN TO BLOOM» unfolds across immersive LED walls and sculptural environments, drawing together two mountainous regions: Switzerland and Kurdistan. Two terrains, vastly different in symbolic currency, yet deeply entangled by a shared geopolitical history. Sahin places them in visual dialogue, exposing the hidden violence of romanticised landscapes and reclaiming nature as a site of resistance.

The Matterhorn, ski lifts, Rolex ads, TAZ 83 camouflage, on one side, Swiss identity is dissected through its own iconography. On the other, Kurdish mountain ranges appear not only as strongholds of resistance but as cradles of language, culture, and longing. The images flash, repeat, fracture. And just as they begin to settle into familiarity, they flip. Sahin reminds us, repetition is never innocent. Media are accomplices in violence.

A four-channel video installation forms the beating heart of the exhibition, built from a vast archive of sources, Instagram clips, family footage, army promotional videos, luxury commercials, comics, games. Sahin’s editing is urgent and algorithmic, echoing the digital feedback loops that shape perception today. But within this onslaught lies lyricism, the video cycle follows the arc of a day, from dawn to dusk, and the rhythm of seasons. Two flowers, Gula Xemgîn and the geranium, anchor the narrative. One blooms only in the Kurdish mountains, untamable and in exile’s refusal. The other, domestic and decorative, hides in plain sight, its red hue borrowed for Swiss military camouflage. (…)

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What remains of landscape when it ceases to be a place and becomes a dataset? As we entered the spaces of ZiMMT, we found ourselves wondering whether immersion, that much-lauded mantra of contemporary art, might in fact be a subtle form of dispossession: it envelops us, absorbs us, and quietly disables critical distance. But with Nicolás Rupcich, one does not sink into the landscape, one fractures alongside it. TRL does not ask us to enter, it exposes us.

The ZiMMT hall, with its precisely calibrated acoustics and enveloping geometry, becomes an active component of the work, not merely a container. The atmosphere is dark, but not opaque; sound vibrates through our skin and bones before it reaches the ears. There are no explanatory panels, no reassuring captions: the experience unfolds through disorientation, like walking through a canyon with no path.

At the center, like a rupture in perceptual continuity, stands Black Canyon (2025), a pivotal work drawing on recordings from the Almaty region in Kazakhstan. Yet nothing here is documentary, these canyons are more than places, they are symptoms.

The installation plays with the notion of “noise” in both technical and philosophical terms. The images appear grainy, recomposed, as if first shattered by artificial intelligence and then reassembled without fully following the instructions. There is a constant tension between the desire to see and the impossibility of truly doing so. The same holds for the sound: it doesn’t accompany, it interrupts. It is a porous acoustic landscape, made of digital echoes, glitches, and crackles that seem to emerge from an algorithmic elsewhere. (…)

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That wraps this week’s issue of the Fakewhale Newsletter, be sure to check in for the next one for more insights into the Fakewhale ecosystem!