The Girling Room

Welcome to the unsettling world of Tilly Hawkins, a.k.a. Nukleopatra. Tilly uses installation, sound and performance to explore gender and embodiment in the information age, drawing on the language and imagery of memes, targeted ads, conspiracy theories and propaganda to trace the networked self and the movement of information and commodities.

They are interested in the tension between intimacy and surveillance, and in how the internet can function as both a place of refuge and a site of conflict. Their work explores the bedroom as a space of production and consumption within digital culture, and examines the commodification of the feminine in the digital economy. Through their live performances as robot pop idol Nukleopatra, they interrogate fandom, digital personhood and human-machine relationships.

Tilly turns an unflinching eye on the world of the chronically online. In this alternative reality, the line between empowerment and exploitation is often too fine to see. Their work analyses a life lived through screens, under surveillance and constantly bombarded by propaganda, and the results can often feel a little too close to the bone.

We scroll through a landscape that is part dystopia, part utopia: pop-ups crowd our view, and every second of attention is quietly converted into someone else's money. Data theft has become background noise.

Tilly 2.0, a digital double of the artist, raises pertinent questions about identity and surveillance: what control do we have over our identities when facial recognition and data harvesting have made the body itself a kind of currency, tracked, measured and monetised without consent?

Tilly's work sits inside this paranoia, in a world where companies seem to know exactly how best to manipulate us (usually by surreptitiously gathering our data), and conspiracies feel less like theories and more like plausible business models. Who is left to trust when persuasion has become so precisely engineered?

'The Girling Room' investigates 'girl' as both a performance and a set of characteristics imposed onto artificial beings. It is a sharp, funny and quietly alarming portrait of life under constant surveillance, made by an artist who understands the online world from the inside

This exhibition is funded by the Hervey Benham Charitable Trust.