NL

Event

Exhibition
Exhibition

Data Never Dies

Digital Traces and AI Afterlives

28 August 2026
— 15 November 2026
12:00 — 18:00


Location: IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]
Exhibition opening times: Wednesday until Sunday from 12:00 – 18:00.

Exhibition tickets:
€7,- (Regular), €6,- (Discount CJP, Upas, Student, <18) or €3,50 (With Museumjaarkaart), free (ICOM card)
Tickets

Instagram profiles haunt the internet after their owners have passed away. Forgotten messages are training AI, and deepfakes give our bodies digital double lives, beyond our control and consent. No matter how fleeting they may seem: a photograph, a message, a search query, a profile or avatar. Each and every one leaves a trace. Together, these traces form a digital legacy: scattered fragments of ourselves that are reused and recycled, continue to circulate, and resurface unexpectedly. 

But who decides what is remembered? What lives on beyond the fantasy of safe storage?

Our age of hyperconnectivity offers new ways to document, remember and revisit the past. Our past selves have become searchable, our memories copied, linked and shared. At the same time, this changes how we mourn, and impacts our ability to forget and reshape our digital identity.

In Data Never Dies artists move between digital traces, digital death and AI generation. Video, deepfakes, performance, photography and interactive installations reveal how personal data haunts platforms, clouds and AI systems. Some works create new rituals for mourning and forgetting. Others offer visitors speculative interactions to reflect on their own relationship to data and its afterlife. The exhibition invites you to reflect on what it means to live with data that represents, haunts, or outlives you.

Encounter forgotten Sims that have taken on lives of their own, mourn your crashed laptop, do a data detox and wonder what remains of you online.

The exhibition presents works by Amélie McKee & Melle Nieling, Charmaine Poh, Esther Hovers, Ginevra Petrozzi, Gjorgji Despodov, Janilda Bartolomeu, Joeri Boelhouwer, Kyriaki Goni, playField and Ruben Mols.

Curator: Rosa Wevers.

Guided tours by curator Rosa Wevers

Saturday 29 August 15:30 & Sunday 1 November 14:00

Book your tickets for the Guided Tours

Rosa Wevers guides visitors through the various
artworks and themes of the exhibition. How are
digital technologies changing the way we deal with memory, identity,
loss, and mortality?

 

Comfort Zone

Amélie McKee & Melle Nieling.
 

GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY

Charmaine Poh
 

The Right to be Forgotten

Esther Hovers
 

A Funeral for Digital Data

Ginevra Petrozzi
 

Songs for the Unbodied

playField
 

Cache Cleanse

Gjorgji Despodov
 

_when_scrolling_ becomes_scrying

Janilda Bartolomeu
 

Digital Tomb

Joeri Boelhouwer
 

Deletion Process_Only you can see my history

Kyriaki Goni
 

Attic Memory/Out of Mind (part of the Attic Memory series)

Ruben Mols
Amélie Mckee Melle Nieling Charmaine Poh Esther Hovers Ginevra Petrozzi Gjorgji Despodov Janilda Bartolomeu Joeri Boelhouwer Kyriaki Goni PlayField Ruben Mols

Amélie Mckee

― Artist

Amélie Mckee (b. 1996, FR/GB) is a visual artist working across installations, singular objects and collaborative curatorial projects. Her practice focuses on the conditions set by industrial infrastructures such as electricity grids, Wi-Fi, radio frequencies and smart technologies. Her research taps into how technologies are fetishised as mystical, impenetrable objects, while often being composed of rudimentary materials. Speculative design plays a central role in her practice. Incorporating industrial components such as buttons, cables, switches and metal parts, Mckee creates the impression of functional devices, though their purpose remains obscured. Recent projects include Magnetic Fields, Bliss Gallery, Warsaw (2026); FLOOR SHOW, Euca Annex, London (2026); Afterfire, Minor Attractions, London (2025); Subterfuge, Jedna Dva Tri, Prague (2025); Good Eye Projects residency, London (2025); Immaterial Gelatine, Sherbet Green, London (2025); Artist Run Fair, Willie Willie Studio, Brussels (2025); Post Fascism, Loods6, Amsterdam (2024); Scrap Yard Screenings, Sara’s Worldwide, New York (2023); and The Amazing Sex Show, inter.pblc, Copenhagen (2023). She holds an MA from the RCA CAP: Critical Practice programme (2021) and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art (2018).

Melle Nieling

― Artist

Melle Nieling (b. 1992, Netherlands) is a visual artist who creates video installations, websites, advertisements and sculptures by appropriating the communication strategies, visual languages and materials of corporate architecture, internet spam and fringe ideologies. Through recurring corporate entities, alter egos and low-resolution images, they mimic the mechanisms of online misinformation and manipulation. Translating these concepts into physical environments, Nieling frequently incorporates architectural interventions, using walls and non-functional doors to subvert the limitations of space. Their practice explores the tensions between reality and virtuality, examining how constructed frameworks manipulate human behaviour, dictate social values and distort the consensus of reality. By revealing these shifting states, the work aims to dismantle the exclusive systems that shape perception and induce a dreamlike state in which the fluidity of reality becomes apparent. Nieling has exhibited internationally in Europe and the United States, at venues including Gossamer Fog, inter.pblc, Shipton & semester9, a&o Kunsthalle, Minor Attractions, TETEM, Harlesden High Street, GROVE and SARA’S. They are the recipient of the VFF Annual Award 2026, the Mondriaan Fund stipend for emerging talent in 2022 and 2023, and the Cultuurfonds Young Talent Award in 2019. In autumn 2026, Nieling will take part in a research and development residency at FACT in Liverpool. 

Charmaine Poh

― Artist

Charmaine Poh (b. 1990) is an artist from Singapore working across media, moving image and performance to peel apart, interrogate and hold ideas of agency, repair and the body across worlds. She aligns herself with strategies of visibility, opacity, deviance and futurity. Having spent her youth as a child actor, Poh later eschewed visibility for a practice behind the lens, pursuing still photography for six years. In 2020, she began expanding her mediums to include video and performance, occasionally re-inserting herself on her own terms. Her work has been exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, Blindspot Gallery, REDCAT LA, Huis Marseille and the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, among others. In 2019, she was named one of Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 in the arts. Her work has been collected by institutions including Vega Foundation, Sunpride Foundation and KADIST. She was recently named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year for 2025 and is a recipient of the Villa Romana Prize 2026. Based between Berlin and Singapore, Poh is a co-founder of the magazine Jom and a member of the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR). 

Esther Hovers

― Artist

In her artistic practice, visual artist Esther Hovers investigates how power, politics and control are exercised through urban planning and the use of public space. Trained as a photographer, she creates installations in which photography, drawing, screen printing and film play an equal part. In an age obsessed with speed and technological efficiency, Hovers looks for tranquillity, craftsmanship and the art of handwork. Her work has been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation in New York City, Lianzhou Photo Festival in China and Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam, among others. In 2017, she received the Edward Steichen Award. In 2026, she will be an artist-in-residence at Think Tanger in Morocco. 

Ginevra Petrozzi

― Artist

Ginevra Petrozzi (b. 1997) is an artist and interdisciplinary designer currently living and working in the Netherlands. Her work expands the notion of magical thinking in the context of modern predictive systems, such as AI, machine learning and algorithmic processes. Through academic research, writing and creative production, she makes space for other ideas and forms of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom, both human and non-human. Petrozzi’s work has been exhibited widely, including recent and upcoming exhibitions at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (IT), De Nederlandsche Bank (NL), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), TENT Rotterdam (NL), Mattatoio (IT), INDEX Braga Biennial (PT), Science Gallery London (UK), Het HEM (NL), World Design Embassies (NL), MFRU (SI) and Panke Gallery (DE), among others. Since 2025, she has been a PhD candidate in the Industrial Design Department at Eindhoven University of Technology, where she researches new aesthetics for Intelligent Adaptive Systems. 

Gjorgji Despodov

― Artist

Gjorgji Despodov is a multidisciplinary artist from North Macedonia, currently based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He holds a master’s degree in Non Linear Narrative from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In 2025, he received the STRP Young ACT Award for his graduation project. Despodov’s practice blends investigative methods with playful elements, rooted in storytelling and deeply engaged with internet and digital culture. His work often employs familiar objects that reflect personal experiences while opening portals into speculative, world-building narratives. His practice exists on the threshold between physical and digital environments. He refers to his projects as provocotypes: prototypes that do not aim to resolve, but to provoke; that insist on incompleteness as a method of critique. Unlike functional prototypes that strive towards optimisation, provocotypes thrive in friction. They are not answers, but interruptions, creating spaces for dialogue and critical reflection. 

Janilda Bartolomeu

― Artist

Janilda Bartolomeu is an artist-filmmaker, curator and researcher whose practice communes with the ghosts of colonial pasts, engages acts of disruptive imagination, and navigates diasporic cinemas from across the globe. Working at the crossroads of memory and future speculation, she uses moving images to document, reimagine and conjure new worlds through generative friction. Her work moves through time, ghosts, roots, routes and crossroads. Let’s break spells. 

Joeri Boelhouwer

― Artist

Returning to memories of his childhood, Joeri Boelhouwer (b. 1999) reconstructs places and experiences through photography and digitally modelled 3D environments. He merges these into hyperrealistic images in which the line between the artificial and the real disappears. Boelhouwer works across photography, 3D rendering, animation and installation. His work has been shown and published internationally, including at PH Museum, Bologna, Galerie Pouloeuff, Naarden, and Fisheye Immersive, which dedicated an article to his video installation Digital Tomb.

Kyriaki Goni

― Artist

Kyriaki Goni is a multidisciplinary artist based in Athens, Greece. Working across CGI video, sculpture, textiles, sound, coding, drawing and installation, she explores the intersections of technology, ecology and more-than-human worlds. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at The Breeder (Athens), KVOST Art Collection Telekom (Berlin), Onassis Stegi (Athens), Aksioma (Ljubljana) and SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen), and in international exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Warsaw Biennale, transmediale and the Istanbul Design Biennial. She has received commissions, awards and fellowships from STARTS, Ars Electronica, Telekom, Allianz Kulturstiftung and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. 

PlayField

― Artist

PlayField is an art collective founded by Lana and Marthe Schneider. They create performances, installations and participatory projects at the intersection of art, science and technology. Their work is driven by contemporary social issues and explores how artistic and scientific methodologies can challenge and enrich one another. By introducing new rules of play and questioning existing systems, PlayField creates space for doubt, imagination and collective reflection. PlayField is currently the resident artistic collective at the GUM & Botanical Garden. 

Ruben Mols

― Artist

Ruben Mols (b. 1991, Goirle) critically examines the development of information technology, blending feelings of curiosity and scepticism. Over the past thirty years, this technology has become increasingly intertwined with everyday life, prompting Mols to raise fundamental questions about how it shapes our relationship with the world. How do electronic devices and virtual experiences influence our perception of our bodies and minds? And how do they reshape our understanding of the environments we inhabit? Through visual investigations, Mols explores the complex relationship between people, electronic devices and digital tools. 

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LINKS

Workshop The Order of Disappearance
Read the review by NRC
Read the review by De Volkskrant
Listen to CrowdScience by the BBC about Data Never Dies

This event is made possible by

Event archive
Website by HOAX Amsterdam