Olia Lialina
Born in Moscow in 1971 and now based in Germany, Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene - an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century, her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, "net.language" and vernacular web - in both artistic and publishing projects - has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory.
Lialina has, for the past two decades, produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), Last Real Net Art Museum (2000), Online Newspapers (2004-2018), Summer (2013), Self-Portrait (2018), Best Effort Network (2015-2020), Hosted (2020).
Lialina is also known for using herself as a GIF model, and is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.
Her work has been exhibited extensively online and at venues including the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Western Front, Vancouver; and/or, Dallas/LA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York; Barbican, London; LEAP, Berlin; MOTI, Breda; HEK, Basel; The Kitchen, NY; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
