BIOGRAPHY
Born 1983 in Abu Dhabi, BENKA is lucky to have the opportunity to see the world through his family travels from his childhood onwards. All these experiences serve to enrich his imagination and his wish to bring about noise through colours.
After an average high-school curriculum in Vienna, BENKA took to music. He joined different metal bands as a drummer, and starred in a multitude of concerts throughout Europe. BENKA pursued his music career while studying for his clinical psychology degree with a focus on smartphone addictions. This is the subject of his thesis and inspires him to create paintings representing aspects of the AIs and the smartphone addiction problem in our society.
In 2015 BENKA started studying art as a self-taught artist and has since devoted himself to his painting.
BENKA opposes mankind´s dangerous game of underestimating the consequences of AIs. Whether it is the digitization of our social relations through the invasion of smartphone screens, the progressive introduction of humanoids such as Aida, Sophia or Erica and cyber-surveillance, our contemporary society is facing a decisive mutation.
His artistic approach aims to expose the question of the robotization of our world. If we are still very far from a war against robots as seen in the series of Terminator, our time calls in his opinion to the questioning of our relationship to artificial intelligence. If A.I. has a considerable advantage in fields such as medicine or astronomy, on the other hand, it presents many drawbacks and raises both questions and concerns.
These numbers and letters in his paintings are captchas.
A captcha is a program that protects websites from bots by generating tests that humans can perform unlike malicious computer programs (robots). The captcha is used to verify, for example, that you are a human when connecting to an interface (login) or to avoid “SPAM” on your mailboxes for contact forms on your website. These captchas are interpreted by BENKA and transformed into a symbol of his artistic struggle.
EXHIBITIONS
SOLO
2020 CAPTCHA, Galerie Kaysser, Ruhpolding, Germany
2018 Take a look into your reflection, Galerie Kaysser, Ruhpolding, Germany
2018 You´d better shoot the robot first, Galerie Z 22, Berlin, Germany
BOOTHS
2020 ART KARSLRUHE, Galerie Z22, Karslruhe, Germany
2019 Discovery Art Fair, Galerie Z22, Cologne, Germany
2018 Discovery Art Fair, Galerie Z 22, Frankfurt, Germany
2018 Art Salzburg Contemporary, Galerie Z 22, Salzburg, Austria
2018 MUNICH ART HOUSE, self-representation, Munich, Germany
2017 Kunstmesse Leipzig, self-representation, Leipzig, Germany
2017 Contemporary Art Ruhr, Galerie Z 22, Essen, Germany
2017 ARTMUC, self-representation, Munich, Germany
2017 Discovery Art Fair, Galerie Z 22, Berlin, Germany
2017 Discovery Art Fair, self-representation, Cologne, Germany
GROUP
2020 WAY OUT, Grange Gallery, Cernay-les-Reims, France
2020 Kunst Salon, Galerie Kaysser, Ruhpolding, Germany
2019 Kunst Salon, Galerie Kaysser, Ruhpolding, Germany
2019 Aus der Strömung 4, KUNST BLOCK BALVE, Munich, Germany
2018 Armer Sammler, Berlin, Germany
2017 Autodidakt, Kunstarkaden, Munich, Germany