The physical gestures that make up our interactions with touch-screen personal devices are intensely intimate yet abstract signatures of our everyday browsing and messaging patterns. In his While you are surfing series, Arslan Sukan scans the surfaces of digital devices (iPhones) and manipulates the resulting images to isolate and enhance the fingerprints, dust and cracks which mark the screens. Sukan separates the intimate swipes and taps of screen navigation from any digital content, enlarging the marks to form anonymous and abstract landscapes. Printed on highly reflective metallic paper using an inkjet printer, each piece mirrors the context of its place of display, transforming the physical world and the body of the viewer into virtual content for the image surface. But, unlike fingers on a screen, the reflections leave no physical trace on their object.
Untitled 13 and Untitled 14 (Diptych), 2014
Untitled 13 and Untitled 14 (Diptych), 2014
From the series of While You Are Surfing
Inkjet print on fine art paper
Dimensions: 59.06 H x 78.75 W in
Edition of 5 + 1AP
Unframed
Sukan is a multi-faceted artist who is trained in interior architecture and photography and has tackled ideas that question the limitations of human perception, the borders between the physical and the virtual as well as the visible and the invisible. Sukan’s work positions the artist as a challenging narrator who re-creates an idea or a form that confirms viewer expectations at first glance while undercutting them in practice.
