“ What about the body in connectivity? We tend to forget it, but the digital realm is not disembodied or a pure ethereal abstraction: indeed, it mobilizes our bodies, our very flesh. “Digital” comes from the Latin “digitus”, the finger; these fingers that scroll worlds on our smartphones, and which play a substantial role in Rima Khraief's work. Our fingers touch the surface of the water, or plunge straight into it, to “ edit ” the portraits generated by artificial intelligence and projected onto trays containing water and mirrors- a natural editing process, so to speak, which bypasses any image-processing software, and is achieved by using the reflective nature of the water to distort the images; images doubly reshaped, by artificial intelligence and by our fingers. “Fugitives” are our gestures that scroll content on screens on a daily basis; as fugitive as these shudders in the water that allow the public, through their participation, to take on a more active role than they usually do by doom scrolling. Through these artificial portraits, Khraief's work invites us to question our digital identity, the “ fingerprints ” we leave online; those perennial traces that can pursue us when we want to forget them, and that are, in the end, not so fleeting."

Yesmine Karray