04 / 06
The Distorted Reality
Core Themes
Character assassination, online bullying, defamation, gendered double standards in digital spaces, AI deepfakes, and the absence of digital identity protection.
Artist Statement
Identity is no longer self-authored. It is rewritten by rumours and distorted. Identity is dissolved beneath fiction, which is circulated until it hardens into fact. This is a slow rewriting of presence, the quiet theft of voice in a space where visibility becomes its own form of confinement. In the public sphere, narrative is weaponised, and the truth must compete with its counterfeit.
“Violence doesn’t always look like fists or threats. Sometimes, it looks like silence. Like a lie no one bothers to correct. Like a fake image that becomes more real than the truth. And it costs us our voices. It cost me mine.”
Concept Breakdown
A live camera feed captures the participant and displays them on a digital screen. Over this image, a simulated social media live comment feed appears, showing real comments often directed at women in politics in the Maldives. The installation switches between two comment feeds, one for a female politician and one for a male, exposing the double standard in how each is treated online. The aim is to highlight how violence does not always take physical form; it can occur through hate speech, harassment, and the spread of misinformation designed to discredit individuals. By placing the visitor’s own face inside this feed, the installation makes the mechanism of online character assassination personal and immediate.
At intervals, the live feed glitches and distorts, the participant’s image fracturing, warping, and momentarily reshaping into something that is no longer quite their own. This visual disruption represents the growing and unchecked use of AI-generated deepfakes weaponised against women in public life, and the absence of digital identity protection laws in the Maldives that leaves victims with little recourse. The glitch is deliberately unsettling: it reminds the viewer that in the current landscape, one’s face, voice, and likeness can be taken, altered, and circulated without consent, and that the legal framework to protect against this simply does not yet exist.