Performing for no audience

Alya Alqarni

Alya Alqarni is a research-based artist, examining how emerging technologies shape contemporary cultural narratives and future forms of art.

Her artistic work engages with AI-generated systems, cultural data bias, and questions of representation within technological infrastructures. Her work has been presented at international exhibitions, research platforms, and institutional programs, including Cairotronica, NeurIPS’ Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Ithra, the G20 Global AI Summit, and Sadu Studio Art Residency in Kuwait. She has also presented and spoken on contemporary museum practice, design, and artificial intelligence at venues including the Saudi National Museum, Ithra, among other.

Alqarni holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and is currently pursuing an MA in Museum Studies at SOAS, University of London.

Projects
Meme-graph
Performing for no audience
Misidentified: A Garden of Men
Misidentified: Zine
Hybrid perception : A Stereoscopic Synthesis of Analog and Digital Forms

Other
Experiment 1

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Performing for no audience
Ceramic sculpture, photogrammetry, 3D printing, performance
2018

Performing for no audience is an experimental research examining the tension between self-perception and the external gaze. Beginning from a personal experience of being observed, categorized, and interpreted
through cultural assumptions, the project investigates how identity changes when it is translated into digital and sculptural forms.

Starting with an experimental performance where the artist turns the metaphor into a physical condition, she is stuck in concrete, and then breaking free. The labour in this act recreates the social conditions in
a literal sense. The artist then, takes that experiment to a gaming enviroment, to allow the users to embody the artist and live through the frustrating position and the great releif after breaking out of that
concrete mold. The final work originated through photogrammetric scans that transformed a physical subject into a three-dimensional model. This digital reconstruction with its limitations and flaws was then materialized as a ceramic sculpture positioned on a concrete pedestal, reducing the complexity of the scanned body into a singular object of display.

By moving between body, scan, object, and simulation, the research explores how technologies of representation produce distance between lived experience and its image. The project considers how identity is continually reconstructed through systems that claim to document reality while simultaneously reshaping it.

Performing For No Audience was created in 2018, and named retrospectively in 2026.