Participating artists: Alsoguppyme, Augustin Rebetez, Bengt Tibert, Boris Eldagsen, Crudguts, Esther Hunziker, Imagine That, Ian Haig, Infrarouge, Mind Wank, Monstr Within, Placenta Shake, Rosemberg, Rashed Haq, Snadwich, Synthetic Pink, Tangled In Numbers, Them Realms, Vince Fraser
In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a guide of souls, a figure who mediates between the conscious and the unconscious. Neither angel nor demon, the psychopomp belongs to the threshold: a liminal presence that helps us cross from one state of being to another. In mythology, it takes the form of Hermes, the raven, the trickster, the dream figure that points the way. In this exhibition, the psychopomp appears again, not in myth, but in machine.
Curated by artist Boris Eldagsen, PSYCHOPOMP presents a selection of artists who use artificial intelligence not as a generator of images, but as a medium of introspection. These are not shiny renderings or speculative utopias. Instead, the works dive deep into psychic strata: dreams, shadows, discomforts, ghosts of memory, and flickering fragments of the self. Here, AI becomes an accomplice to the unconscious and a mirror in which we glimpse what usually hides.
The participating artists open subtle passages into the unspoken. Some work with bodily distortion and surreal textures. Others resurrect half-remembered places, dissolve identity into dream logic, or glitch language into something unrecognizably intimate. The result is a spectrum of visual psychologies: uncanny, poetic, and at times deeply unsettling. These images do not invite easy interpretation, they disturb, disorient, and linger.
For Boris Eldagsen, the role of the artist mirrors that of the psychopomp: one who leads others through terrain they cannot navigate alone. In this exhibition, that terrain is not technological, but emotional. Not speculative, but deeply human.
PSYCHOPOMP inaugurates the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Arts with a question, not a claim. What happens when machines are invited to help us remember what we forgot or never quite knew? What forms emerge when we trace the outlines of our shadow selves? These works do not offer answers. But they point the way.
“Art should haunt a little. Welcome to the shadow.”
