Delarue Chloé
TAFAA – Fertility Device (Uncanny Valley)

On three synchronized, vertically arranged screens, a life-sized woman approaches the viewers. Instead of protective skin, however, the exposed, skinned, and thus simultaneously anonymized body is covered by a rigid latex imprint on a glass plate. On the imprint, the grimace of a troll face is recognizable.

This installation is part of the series of works titled TAFAA – Toward A Fully Automated Appearance, inspired by an article published in 1971 by economist Fischer Black about the automation of the stock market. Within the series, Delarue uses latex as materia prima, which can assume any form within her works. She casts endlessly falling leaves from it, as well as repeatedly shed snake skins or even cigarettes, relics of the ubiquitous advertising and marketing cycle that begins with the Marlboro Man. As in Ovid's Metamorphoses, she develops her own contemporary mythology of the overlay of biological life, AI, and virtual identity formation through her installations. In the case of the troll's malicious grin, she reveals the demonic, Dionysian side of her virtual mythology – the shedding, the exposure within social networks, which turns users into easy targets for anonymous provocations and insults. Uncanny Valley was specifically created for the Pax Art Awards exhibition at the HeK, for which Delarue was honored.