Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture with his radically reduced formal language of clear lines and transparency. Claudia Larcher pieces together his building elements – frames, columns, banisters –, makes them rotate around their vertical axes, multiplies and superimposes them until a dizzying compression is achieved which supplants the enclosed space and thus transparency.

Painting, virtual sculptures, technophile hybrids of reality and illusion – Aaron Jablonski has been creating mobile face filters for social media channels since 2018. Sometimes they form a confusing swarm of echoes around a head, sometimes they come as spiky digital punk. His immaterial masks, hovering between fashion and art, conceal as much as they reveal about their wearers.

A real-life tropical holiday resort becomes a stage where staff and guests play their roles in tableaux vivants. They hide their faces behind carved emoji masks that serve – in the digital world – to express emotions and rate things. The result is a superficial and at the same time subversive semi-reality of linguistic, social and cultural levels of (mis-)communication.

The façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 forms the presentation surface for an animated architectural collage. Staggered exterior views of buildings rotate. The game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries has an irritating effect. The spatial depths lure the eye into the supposed interior of the body behind the skin of the façade, which is at the same time the mirror of an urban architecture of restlessness.

A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through the rooms and floors which are unfolded and seamlessly joined by the editing. Small oddities proliferate in the bourgeois habitat: an unanswered doorbell, an open freezer emitting light. Normality, perhaps unintentionally, whispers something uncanny.

During a ramble through the forest we see video colour fringes break through the shadows of the canopy. Rolls of thunder and birdsong spread as a deep red pixel moss carpet. Ambient sounds creep up from the distance to filter the visual world. Hallucinogenic data errors drag like scrapers across a discarded layer of paint. The forest becomes a cathedral for the eyes and ears.

An infrared dot pattern scans body shapes to supply system information for fascinating volume images. The space casts are virtual sculptures, mouldable, with unstable aggregate states. DJ Dixon’s “Transmoderna” performance is pulverized to the beats of Mëhill’s track “Through Withdrawals”: waves of millions of luminescent coloured microbodies against a black infinity.

Our hovering gaze circles a free-standing rock on a wide plain. The recording gets stuck. At ever shorter intervals the massive rock formation breaks out of the solidifying background until data smears and artefacts accumulate as fine digital sediment layers and congeal into new formations. The video signal interference acts like a primal force of geological history.

Nothing is closer to us than our skin. Its beautiful and less beautiful parts envelop the self, separate it from all else. A foray along naked parts of the body takes us from a shiny ridge via a rounded protuberance to a shady gorge. A neck. A belly…ear. A fellybear? Photos, videoclips and sounds form an irritating body collage.