Ahmet Öğüt, From the series neither artificial nor intelligent, 2023-2025, Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm | Photo: Clelia Cadamuro | Courtesy A plus A Gallery

The solo exhibition by Ahmet Öğüt titled neither artificial nor intelligent is hosted at A plus A Gallery in Venice until 8 February 2026. It presents ten oil portraits selected from a larger series of fifty works produced over the past three years. Each painting, a square format measuring seventy centimetres per side, depicts figures the artist describes as real, semi-real or imaginary artists, based in different cities that are deliberately never disclosed to the public. The exhibition design employs translucent panels that partially veil the paintings and compel the viewer to move through the space to recompose the image, turning the act of looking into a physical and non-immediate experience. The decision not to circulate images of the works online before the close of the exhibition reflects the artist’s intention to preserve a direct encounter with painting, removed from algorithmic mediation and digital distribution. The title of the show draws on a critical reflection about the social and material implications of artificial intelligence, recalling an imaginary that stretches from historical physiognomy to contemporary systems of visual classification. Öğüt explores how associations and biases emerge automatically when we read a face, a medium or a cultural background, and how these automatisms are embedded both in human perception and in today’s technological systems. The exhibition suggests that the visual codes and biases shaping current technologies are heirs to structures of power and categorisation rooted in Western history. With this project, Öğüt, known mainly for participatory and socially oriented interventions, opens a different front in his research by entrusting painting with the task of questioning identity, perception and representation without offering definitive answers. The exhibition becomes an invitation to suspend automatic judgments, recognise the political implications of looking and restore centrality to in-person experience at a time when the circulation of images is increasingly filtered and accelerated by the digital realm.