Refractions is a mixed media installation exploring the mythological Cyclops’ cave in Cyprus. Since 2022, Menkman has been traveling across the Mediterranean, researching the Cyclopes, creatures known for their enormous size and single eye, but otherwise shrouded in mystery. This work seeks to give a voice to these mythical creatures and examine how human perception can be informed by fictional perspectives, offering insights for the future. Menkman interprets mythology as an evolving algorithm, adapting its parameters based on context, and thus expanding her research to include other Cyclopean artifacts and narratives. Her goal is to move these myths beyond their geographic and temporal boundaries into a more contemporary setting.

Rosa Menkman developed Refractions in 2023 during her residency at NeMe (CY).

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. The journey of her protagonist, the Angel of History—inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940—functions as a foundational framework for her explorations of image processing technologies. In her written research, Rosa focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analog and digital media. As a compendium to this research, she published Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011), a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts.

She further explored the politics of image processing in Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, Rosa describes how the standardization of resolutions promotes efficiency, order, and functionality, but also involves compromises, resulting in the obfuscation of alternative ways of rendering.

In 2019, Rosa won the Collide Arts Barcelona-award at Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into im/possible images, consolidated in the im/possible images reader (published by the i.R.D. & Lothringer, with support from V2, 2022).

Funded by the European Media Arts Platform (EMAP) and hosted by NeMe (CY).
Images: courtesy of the artist