Virtual Beauty Exhibition at Somerset House Challenges Digital Identity and AI Aesthetics

13 July 2025

INES ALPHA

When Virtual Beauty opens at Somerset House on July 23, it will confront visitors with the profound ways digital culture has reshaped self‑image, beauty and identity in an era dominated by screens, social media and artificial intelligence. Co‑curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, Mathilde Friis and Bunny Kinney to celebrate the institution’s 25th anniversary, the exhibition brings together more than 20 artists working across sculpture, video, performance and immersive installation to question who defines beauty when filters, avatars and generative software prevail.

Artists like ORLAN and Amalia Ulman serve as powerful entry points. ORLAN’s landmark 1993 piece Omniprésence, in which she live‑streamed plastic surgery to fuse classical features with her own face, is displayed alongside Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, a fictional Instagram‑based storyline that revealed the malleability and performative manipulation of online personae. These pioneering works anchor the show in early digital interventions, while contemporary pieces chart the evolving landscape of algorithmic beauty.

Newer contributions probe AI’s role in reshaping aesthetic norms. Minne Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams and Isamaya Ffrench each use machine learning to craft portraits that expose the limitations and biases of beauty algorithms, Atairu’s “Blonde Braids Study II” questions AI’s color and hair texture stereotypes, revealing systemic erasure of Black identity. These works underscore the gulf between digitally curated images and the lived complexity of real bodies.

Qualeasha Wood tackles the mental toll of digital beauty through tapestry, an analog medium traditionally associated with history. Her work weaves together selfie images, abusive messages and browser windows into physical form, highlighting the psychological fracture between online visibility and offline well‑being. Wood draws parallels between historic Jacquard looms and today’s code‑based world, reminding viewers that digital culture is just one chapter in humanity’s long relationship with technology and self‑expression.

Hyungkoo Lee’s facial‑alteration sculptures, Harriet Davey’s avatar installations and Andrew Thomas Huang’s return of Björk avatars further explore the blur between virtual and physical identities. As technology enables identity to be endlessly re‑curated through filters, avatars, and AI fakery, the exhibition grows essential, questioning who holds control over image and authenticity.

Digital culture also magnifies the pressures of comparison. The term “Snapchat dysmorphia,” where individuals seek cosmetic surgery to imitate filtered images, speaks to the unhealthy fixation fashioning real bodies to match screen perfection. Orlan preemptively rebelled against such pressures, long before TikTok or AI filters proliferated suggesting these concerns may now be reaching a crescendo in contemporary aesthetics.

The exhibition culminates in Filip Ćustić’s pi(x)el, a female silicone sculpture embedded with flowing video screens that display images of scars and disabilities. Here the boundary between flesh and digital becomes indistinguishable suggesting future bodies may exist as hybrid canvases where identity is co‑composed with software.

Underlying these installations is an uneasy question posed by digital artist Mat Collishaw: is artificial intelligence nurturing a form of sentience that could overtake human creativity and reshape our own agency? As the show ends, one is left pondering whether beauty’s democratization through tech is empowering or whether algorithms have begun to enslave us with new ideals and compulsions.

Virtual Beauty runs at Somerset House’s Terrace Rooms from July 23 to September 28, and is open to all ages fifteen and over at “pay‑what‑you‑can” prices . It offers timely reflection on identity, aesthetics and digital power in a world where algorithms, filters, and image‑editing now shape not only what we see but who we become.