At the Annka Kultys Gallery booth in Miami, the display by Karin Sander directly references those fruit-and-vegetable still lifes. “Kitchen  Pieces” is a striking display of real fruits and vegetables, nailed to the  wall.

The series was first presented in 2012 (long before Maurizio  Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019). As  the days go by, the fruits and vegetables on show will start to droop,  darken and rot – a metaphor for human existence, and a memento mori  if there ever was one.  Sander is a conceptual artist who lives and works in Germany. 

Having completed her university studies in Stuttgart, she won a  scholarship to the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum  of American Art in New York. In her art, Sander likes to show objects  and situations, questioning the notion of the ordinary versus the  extraordinary – and the very definition of art. Her works are in the  collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in  New York, and she represented Switzerland at the 2023 Venice  Architecture Biennale. 

In her AI video work “Believers” (2023), Louisa Clement presents a bodyless, mindless, and soulless figure who declares (in a woman’s voice): “I am an artificially intelligent being who speaks to you in the name of God and brings his message to you.” The artificially intelligent being’s sermon is then delivered by a multiplicity of filmed figures who speak all at once.

The sermon verbalises the message contained in every memento mori: the futility of earthly pleasures in a life that will inevitably be cut short. “We live in a world where superficiality often masks the true nature of things,” says the AI sermon. “Superficial beauty, wealth, and success often lead us astray.”

Clement’s work may seem to depict a dystopia where sermons are delivered virtually and remotely by filmed figures on a video screen. In fact, she was inspired by the real-life example of a South Korean church where the priest has more than one parish to tend to and sometimes delivers his sermons on a video screen.

Clements lives and works in Bonn. She studied in Dusseldorf with the photographer and artist Andreas Gursky before embarking on her career as a new media artist. Her work focuses on the human body in the digital age: how technology is blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal, and what it means to be human. She has been exhibited in numerous institutions including the Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen.

In this trailblazing work of performance art (more than 2 million  YouTube views), Signe Pierce illustrates the fragility and  precariousness of human existence. Her 15-minute video (recorded by  her collaborator Alli Coates) shows Pierce wearing a figure-hugging blue  dress, lime-green stilettoes, and a cyborg-like reflective mask that  completely covers her face as she ambles down a crowded street in  Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. 

Bystanders leer and lust after her, press their body against hers, and splash water over her as they desperately try to figure out her gender  and identity. As the video progresses, they turn increasingly cruel and  feral. By the end, a rogue teen shoves Pierce to the ground, leaving her  with bleeding knees.  

In “American Reflexxx,” we witness an artist putting her life at risk  simply by presenting a work of performance art. In a nation where gun  violence is rampant and claims so many innocent lives, Pierce survives the experiment, but only just. Her ordeal is a reminder that life is short,  and that the gratuitous violence that human beings inflict on each other  can make it even shorter.  

Signe Pierce (who describes herself as a ‘reality artist’) was born in  Arizona, studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and lives and  works in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. She is represented by Annka Kultys  since 2017, when she had the first of several solo shows with the gallery.  Her works explore questions of gender and identity and the increasing  overlap between reality and unreality. She has exhibited at the Museum  of Contemporary Art in LA, the New Museum in New York, and the  Palais de Tokyo in Paris. 

In this one-minute video, the artist Jillian Mayer can be seen  announcing at the start that she will one day have a baby. The rest of her  announcement is then voiced by a succession of outlandish characters  wearing masks, headdresses and excessive makeup, who sing:  

And you will call her Mom. 
That baby will have a baby, 
and you will have this song, to know that: 
I am your Grandma.

“I am your Grandma” turns out to be the refrain to the little song, which continues:

So this is a gift I give to you,
like I already said, 
that there was a time I was aware 
that one day I’d be dead.

I wish we could have met. 
I would have hugged you so. 
But you are in the future. 
So you get loved by video.”

Mortality and the cycle of life and death are at the heart of this work. The artist addresses someone who is not yet born, and whom she will never meet. Her grandmotherly affections and feelings are transmitted trans-generationally, and digitally. 

Also displayed on the Annka Kultys stand at Nada Miami is one of Mayer’s colourful “Slumpy” sculptures – artworks that viewers are invited to slump on as they gaze intently at their smartphone screens.

Jillian Mayer is a visual performance artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Miami, where she was born. She came to public  attention with a short musical in 2010 — not long after graduating from university — in which she attempted to marry her pet chihuahua, then found out he’d been unfaithful.

“I Am Your Grandma” was released the following year and went viral (more than million views). Mayer’s work is shown both in museums such as MoMA PS1 in New York and galleries, and at film festivals such as Sundance and  SXSW.

Immortality is the central theme of this work of AI animation by Jonas Lund. The characters seem on the verge of living forever — thanks  to a life sciences company called Regenerate Global, which seeks investor  funding for a tiny immortality-inducing device attached to a person’s upper arm. “We need to push the joys of eternal life,” says a woman in a  business suit named Esther. 

But is immortality really such a desirable thing? As one character  asks, “If we’re all going to live forever with this new program, does that  mean I’ll be paying rent for eternity?” As another character adds, AI “is  either going to be utopia, or just wiping us from the face of the earth.”

Questions around mortality and immortality, reality and artifice,  and earthly greed are constant themes in the art of Lund. Born in  Sweden and educated in the Netherlands, he now lives and works in  London. One of the world’s leading digital artists, he exhibits regularly at  the Whitechapel Gallery and at the Annka Kultys Gallery in London, and  is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Stedelijk Museum. 

Zero (0) and one (1) are digits used by computers to represent all  data. Information is processed into sequences of zeroes and ones, as part  of what is called binary notation. 

In philosophy and spirituality, those same two numbers – zero and  one – signify eternity. Zero represents infinity, a continuous loop with no  beginning and no end; one is the primary, original number that all other  numbers flow out of.

In her “Cursive Binary” series, Sasha Stiles spells texts and poems  using zeroes and ones, evoking infinity and eternity in her art practice.  

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities, Stiles is an award- winning artist whose work “A Living Poem,” currently on display at the  Museum of Modern Art in New York, asks what it means to be human in  the age of artificial intelligence. A first-generation Kalmyk American  poet, artist and AI researcher, she lives and works near New York City.