Cari Călinici

The works of Cari Călinici are forged with objects and subjects that elude, disappear/reappear from public consciousness and modulate their existence in mainstream infrastructures. Cari is curious about how the global economy and unsustainable perpetual growth have led to a fetishisation of youth and acceleration. Călinici’s recent work touches on domestic relationships with refrigeration, power dynamics of game controllers, disparities of wealth in technology consumerism, and the resolution and potency of 3D printed chain mail armour. Are we ready to see computers outlast us? When do we—our conscious identity—stop and our devices begin? This brought Cari to think of immortality, nostalgia, and collapse. Can obsolete technologies haunt us back? We assimilate into technology daily and trivially—doom scrolling on a fridge or watching Netflix on your car’s infotainment. Working around trans-feminist theory, Cari explores the implications technology and capitalist acceleration have for our bodies, identities, habitat, and non-human co-habitants. In ‘Preserved, Permafrosted, Perverted’, consumer refrigerators become a cryogenic force regaining a new standing outside the home. Forming a small herd of human-scaled fridges, they are inspired by recurrent fabulations of immortality elixirs, fountains of youth, and cryogenically preserved brains. Cari has questioned the bio-availability of information in our teeth: as the final part of a body to decompose, they represent a signifier of one’s life—frozen (bio)capital. In a digitally mediated society, usership becomes a permanent means of production and consumption, confusing the role of the user as consumer, when in fact she is more often the unconscious producer of data goods. Labour hides behind the appearance of control. ‘Control Freak’ proposes its controllers as a chance to replay the game and notice our dominant behaviours in digital interactions. Exposed to the internet and migrating toward niche online communities, Călinici understands digital identities as a means of protection. Growing up lesbian in Romania, and needing a place dislocated from the IRL—the internet offered a secondary virtual map of the world and its inhabitants. Forging digital profiles allows for constant self-reinvention and awareness of identity as means of defence. ‘Data Never Dies’ and ‘Abort, Retry, Fail?’ are products of those performative protection behaviours shaped within constructed identities online. Ultimately, ‘(5th work)’ is a swansong to the acceleration of global trade, in tech goods and information. The corrugated cardboard from a luxury tech commodity is permanently cast in foreverized* metal, not dissimilar in texture and purpose to that of containerization** and the (corrugated) steel shipping box. Engaged in critical theory and digital discourse followed by action, one can begin to manifest and forge futures in which techno-feudal surveillance hegemonies can be hijacked.

Artist statement
Like many others of this generation Cari Călinici has been shaped by constant reference to the force of the WorldWideWeb. As a ‘digital mediator’ with a complicated admiration for technology, Cari points out the acidity and wackiness of technology as it comes in contact with more of the IRL. Călinici is a multimedia installation artist driven by the erratic presence of technology in explorations of identity issues, and the friction between postmodern pastiche and the lived realities of (art) consumption and production. Examining internet infrastructures on oceanic floors, teeth and forensic politics, fridges and sexuality, the corporeality of borders or the bygone alchemy haunting contemporary science and culture, Călinici shapes her practice critically around histories of invisible and spectral subjects/objects/networks.

*foreverism, grafton tanner
**the forgotten space, 2010

This page was last updated on July 7, 2025