Your work has moved through painting, installation, and film; sometimes documentary, sometimes something closer to fiction. What determines which form a piece needs, especially when the subject matter is as charged as displacement or heritage?

I often think the process or medium determines what the work will become. My paintings are generally closer to fiction, as I enjoy world-building and playing with abstraction through oil paint; I find it harder to do this within film. It’s also about how you want the audience to absorb the information or research you’re presenting. Not every medium is suited to every idea; it’s a bit like a puzzle.

Sometimes you can end up with mismatches, or works that feel overwhelming, which is something I try to avoid, especially when working with ideas of displacement, fragmentation, or reinvention. Ultimately, it comes down to what makes sense for the work and, for me, a certain gut feeling.

You sit on Whitechapel Gallery’s Ethics Committee while also making work that critiques institutional space. How do you hold both roles, insider and critic, without one compromising the other?

I think the two roles complement each other; I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as either an insider or a critic. That’s one of the benefits of being an artist: you can move through institutional spaces differently from someone employed by an institution full-time.

I often bring the same critical lens I apply in my practice to my work at Whitechapel Gallery. I think a good institution listens, and over the last few years it has become increasingly important for institutions to respond to artists’ demands, particularly given how volatile the industry has become.

Some of your work engages directly with Palestinian heritage and loss. What responsibility do you feel toward representing that subject matter as an artist working primarily in London, at some distance from it?

That’s a great question. It’s actually the distance you highlight that interests me most, rather than loss itself. I am more focused on how Palestinian culture reproduces and reinvents itself within Europe: how it is forced to adapt, and what that adaptation, negotiation, or clash looks like.

I’m interested in telling stories that are often rendered invisible within the context of globalisation. Being half Palestinian, with family still in the West Bank, it is also a subject that deeply interests me and touches me on a personal level.

Between Queerdirect as a collective project and your solo studio practice, how differently do you think about permanence and legacy — building something meant to outlast you versus work that’s more personal and immediate?

I don’t really think in terms of legacy; I tend to take things one day at a time. I think it’s a great privilege to make works that will hopefully outlast you, or to work on a project like Queerdirect that has a reach beyond an individual art practice.

Queerdirect has naturally slowed down and sped up over the years. I still very much enjoy the connections that come through the space, as well as conducting artist interviews through the platform. It has now evolved into an online-only space, but it continues to have a life of its own beyond my studio practice.

I was always a keeper of things, a hoarder of sentimentals, and the internet intensified this by making things even more accessible—I get to keep these audios, videos, photos…etc all in one place…I sometimes get overwhelmed by the number of things I keep in the cloud; they are harder to declutter because they feel immaterial, even if there’s hardware that is tangible, the cloud feels limitless, and keeping things digitally makes me feel genuinely safe, because I have a system that I can find things in and that only I can access, which I can’t do if they were physical.

2. You’ve spoken about taking screenshots, recording digital traces, and even archiving comment sections. Do you see social media and digital platforms as contemporary archives in their own right? What can they tell us about culture that traditional archives cannot?

Keeping a digital personal collection is one thing, and sharing on the internet is another, where things are not for certain and platforms change their rules and guidance, some things simply disappear, and you wonder about whether it ever happened…so I started screenshotting not only to archive but to understand society in a sometimes anthropological lens. I have trouble finding sources on specific subjects, or they are barely any new research that delves deep into it; hence, social media is the best way to investigate topics that are overlooked, so screenshotting became a practice that I use to keep evidence, so I don’t forget, and sometimes keep my rage going if necessary.

3. Your work often moves between video, installation, collage, and physical objects. What determines whether an archive remains digital or becomes material in your practice?

I think most of my work is either a reenactment or directly using the archive, I took up video as way to understand visual language in sequence and use the archive as an exercise for a work I will do perhaps without it, where in objects I think of it as an artefact I want to keep and pass through others, the images are becoming more personal so there’s a lot of layering in the process to protect the privacy but still having it lied out in most of the cases as an offering. There’s always a bit of myself in these archives; they’re not in the past but a continuation of how I see the present. That’s why the idea of consuming it is used as a metaphor—keeping receipts, sweets, and anything that I’m currently pondering as part of these images.

4. Many collectors still associate collecting with physical objects. How do you think collectors should approach works that exist partially through video, digital research, participation, or evolving archives?

That’s a bit of a difficult question for me, because I’m also thinking about it. However, I think one of the most exciting things about these practices is that they are not certain and allow for discovery—offering a chance to be part of this interactive, multimedia, forever-evolving approach to a subject. It’s very much like scrolling… continuously moving, but you can take the parts that resonate the most with you and know it’s going to continue with you or without you; not sure if it’s a bleak statement, but I personally find it thrilling.

5. In your recent work you’ve explored disappearance, memory, and inaccessible places. Do digital technologies help preserve what is being lost, or do they create a different kind of loss altogether?

There’s something particularly interesting about these themes that I find myself revisiting over and over…they are almost like again an exercise of preservation, editing and telling a story through abstraction and poetry, that I feel most myself in, and the archive forces me to think of the physical presence and absence of the subject, same with the internet where it can offers you content with a loss of it context (e.g memes, fake news, ai generated content) that create a new type of illusion, a hyperreality that makes you feel that a sense of reality is being lost

6. As someone who works extensively with archives, what responsibility do artists and collectors have in preserving digital culture for future generations, particularly at a time when platforms, files, and online histories can disappear overnight?

I can mainly speak from an artist’s point of view, and I think continuously using the archive and reappropriating it is essential to the process by downloading, screenshotting, and creating a database system that keeps things safe and secure for a chance of future accessibility. As for collectors to be generous with their collections and give students, researchers, artists, whoever is interested, access where they can study their archives and be reintroduced to a time once again.

Digital art conversations often get trapped in discussions about platforms, AI, NFTs, and whether collectors are finally ready to buy files. What interests me far more are artists using digital tools to investigate things that have traditionally resisted documentation altogether.

I first came across Siddhartha Kunti’s work through his attempts to do something that sounds almost impossible: digitize scent.

While many artists working with technology begin with questions about image-making, AI, or interaction, his practice emerged from a much longer investigation into smell itself. Over the last seven years he has worked at the intersection of chemistry, AI, data analysis, and olfaction, eventually translating that research into a body of work that visualizes scent.

We spoke shortly after his presentation at Art Dubai, where he exhibited work centered around oud, very Dubai. The conversation moved from childhood memories and cultural familiarity to digital collecting, permanence, and why smell remains one of the most overlooked senses in contemporary art.

Your Art Dubai presentation centered around oud, though it felt less like a fragrance project and more like a sensory intervention. What initially drew you to oud as both a material and conceptual starting point?

For me there were two main reasons. The first is that my grandfather was a wood sculptor, and as a child I spent a lot of time in his workshop crafting and experimenting with wood. Oud’s journey from an infected tree to what is often called “liquid gold” fascinated me. It is a reminder that nature is often the ultimate architect of beauty. Agarwood takes years to develop, which creates its scarcity and value. On the surface it is simply an oil, but its scent reveals a much deeper story.

The second reason was cultural. Oud is a core element of Middle Eastern culture, and I have always believed that work should resonate with its audience. People know oud as a smell, but very few have ever seen it visualized or considered the molecular building blocks that create that scent.

Smell is such an intimate and culturally loaded sense. What interests you about scent as a medium compared to image, sound, or text?

For me it remains one of the most underrepresented mediums, both in society and in the arts. It is the only human sense that connects directly to memory and emotion in such a powerful way, yet it is often treated as an afterthought. In most creative projects scent is added at the end as an enhancement. I wanted to reverse that logic and make scent the starting point.

Scent has an extraordinary ability to collapse time.

One of the conversations I had at Art Dubai was with a visitor who described nutmeg as the scent that immediately transported her back to childhood sailing trips with her family.

Your work moves fluidly across mediums and formats. How do you decide what form a work needs to take?

That is one of the things I enjoy most about digital art. The output can change dramatically while the underlying work remains the same.

The first iteration of this project was presented purely as a digital work. For Art Dubai I introduced metal canvases. At the moment I am exploring 3D printing, glass collaborations, and sculptural formats. One digital work can become a print, a sculpture, a hologram, a carving, or something else entirely. Each format speaks differently to audiences and collectors.

A lot of conversations around immersive and sensory art are framed through ideas of innovation and technology. Do those frameworks resonate with you?

My work actually came out of a technological pursuit. Seven years ago I was trying to understand whether scent could be digitized through chemistry and AI. The artworks emerged naturally from that research.

I think that is an important distinction. I am not an artist who went searching for technology. I was already working with technology and eventually realised there was a powerful artistic and cultural story hidden within the data.

I am curious whether audiences in the Gulf engage with the work differently, particularly because oud carries such strong cultural associations.

The response in Dubai was incredibly positive. Many visitors had what I would describe as an “aha” moment. They were encountering something familiar in a completely unfamiliar way. I experienced something similar when exhibiting work in London that was based on whisky data. People connect more deeply when the subject matter already holds cultural meaning for them. I suspect audiences in Europe would still find the oud work interesting, but they would probably move through it more quickly than audiences in the Gulf.

What conversations do you wish collectors were having more often around digital and sensory practices?

I still encounter collectors who struggle with the idea of digital work as a serious collectible. Buying a file, owning something on-chain, or collecting an artwork that exists primarily in the digital realm remains uncomfortable for many people.

What surprised me in Dubai was that collectors overwhelmingly preferred physical manifestations of the work. Museums and institutions have largely accepted digital art, but parts of the market are still catching up.

When someone acquires one of your works, what are they actually collecting?

I think they are collecting a kind of time capsule.

The work functions as an olfactive portrait or memory. It captures something that was once ephemeral and preserves it in a form that can potentially be experienced by future generations.

Has the market caught up to these practices yet?

Not entirely.

Progress is happening. Major institutions are collecting digital art and Art Basel continues to invest heavily in the field. At the same time, we are still in the early stages of widespread adoption. The NFT boom and crash complicated the conversation considerably.

I suspect that as younger collectors enter the market we will see a greater willingness to collect works that exist natively in digital formats.

Finally, what are you currently obsessed with?

There is a long list.

I want to continue exploring unusual materials and compounds, including things like cobra venom. At the same time I am increasingly interested in conservation and education.

My grandfather was a beekeeper, and I spent much of my childhood close to nature. I would like the work to advocate for the natural world while revealing forms of beauty that often remain hidden. I am also developing several new technology projects and educational initiatives that use scent, art, and science to engage younger audiences.

Azul felawen,

Couple of notes- so while in Dubai for Art Dubai, I attended an event hosted by Art Jameel where I saw Souvenir (2012) by Fayçal Baghriche, and I think it profoundly shifted something for me.

The artwork was of a spinning globe rotating so fast that geography itself becomes illegible; a luminous blur. What stayed with me was not just the object itself, but the feeling it produced: a world accelerating beyond possession. A planet spinning too fast to be owned, categorized, stabilized, or fully understood.

We are all living in that sentiment.

I think so much of the conversation around technology right now is trapped inside fear. Fear of AI, for sure, but more broadly the fear that the digital somehow contaminates the “authenticity” of art or culture. And maybe some of that fear is real, but I also think we are limiting the conversation when we reduce contemporary technology-based practices to “AI slop,” trend cycles, or the assumption that digital mediums are somehow less rigorous, less emotional, or less intellectually serious than traditional forms.

What feels missing right now is genuine curiosity toward these practices. Like an openness to the possibility that these tools and mediums might also expand artistic language rather than flatten it.

Historically, entire mediums have been dismissed before institutions, platforms, and collectors eventually caught up. Photography. Performance. Experimental sound.

What interests me is not whether technology can become art. It already is. Let’s move past this, everyone.

I am more interested in how artists are using these tools and mediums to speak about memory, migration, surveillance, fantasy, the environment, non-human overlaps, identity, spirituality, labor, intimacy, and the emotional texture of contemporary life.

My own particular interest has always leaned toward artists from the Global South, the diaspora, and communities historically excluded from dominant conversations around technology and digital culture.

Partly because some of the most urgent and sophisticated negotiations around AI, visibility, surveillance, compression, identity, and technological adaptation are already happening there.

Historically, many of these communities have had to improvise through unstable systems, fragmented infrastructures, translation, migration, and layered identities.

Just one small example of what I mean:

Saudi multidisciplinary designer | artist Sara Khalid has always had one of the most compelling approaches to technology within her practice. A Garden of Men, part of her series Misidentified, uses AI-generated imagery to address cultural exclusiveness and bias within machine learning systems through a direct critique of culturally biased datasets. The work asks an important question: how do machines learn to perceive culture, and what happens when entire communities are poorly translated, flattened, or simply absent from the data shaping that perception?

In many ways, these datasets function like a contemporary archaeological archive. They become the record through which societies are interpreted, categorized, and remembered.

At one point, AI interpreted this:

[a group of Saudi men wearing traditional red-and-white shimaghs in a stadium]

as:

“a bunch of vases that are sitting on a table.”

Which is both absurd and deeply revealing.

Khalid then pushed the image through multiple processes using DeepDream and style transfer techniques, layering floral masks and repeated machine reinterpretations until the final work became A Garden of Men: a distorted, uncanny, almost dreamlike meditation on recognition, error, and machine imagination.

And honestly, now my friends, this is where things start getting interesting.

Because the entire project was sparked after another ML model, im2text, identified, or misidentified, an image of a fully covered woman with her son as:

“A man sitting on a curb holding his phone.”

This is art.

Buy it. Put it on your walls. Download it. Add it to your collections. Plug it in. Archive it.

Digital-based practices, particularly from historically overlooked regions and communities, have always fascinated me because they often bypass the traditional gatekeeping mechanisms of the art world entirely. They emerge through platforms, interfaces, gaming engines, AI systems, social media feeds, messaging apps, unstable internet connections, shared files, and improvised digital ecosystems rather than through the conventional white cube alone.

And in many ways, that changes the conversation.

The barriers to entry are different. The visual language is different. The audience is different. The computer is the tableau. Instagram becomes the gallery wall. Discord becomes critique space. WhatsApp becomes archive. TikTok becomes distribution channel, performance space, and algorithmic curator simultaneously. Entire artistic movements now circulate long before institutions understand how to contextualize and/or metabolize them.

I’m here for all of it.

Which also raises a larger question: if the work moves people, shapes visual culture, challenges systems of seeing, and creates entirely new aesthetic vocabularies, does its legitimacy still need to be confirmed by traditional institutions first?

As the kids say, babe, wake up.

In many cases, these artists are already building the contemporary visual language institutions will spend the next decade trying to catch up to.

What changed for me at last week’s exhibition was not the interest itself, but the urgency of it.

Partly because so much public conversation around AI and technology has collapsed into panic, fear, extraction, or lazy dystopianism.

But also because it feels increasingly obvious that institutions, collectors, curators, and cultural platforms are about to confront a much larger shift in what contemporary cultural production actually looks like moving forward.

Not as trend forecasting. Not as novelty. But because these practices are already reshaping visual culture in real time.

They are already influencing how we experience image-making, storytelling, public space, commerce, gaming, architecture, ritual, and even our understanding of selfhood.

Digital art is not outside the conversation anymore. In many ways, it is the conversation.

Anyway.

The question is no longer whether digital practices matter.

The real question is who is paying attention early enough to understand where culture is actually moving.

More soon,

Wided

x

Let’s start with Aïd Moubarak/ عيد مبارك greetings to the 1.8 billion of us. It’s been a funky Eid, funky Ramadan, funky month, funky year but we keep on keeping on.

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