The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art launches third Biennial May 1 - Sept 28, 2025
Dualities, Dimensionality, and Dreamcraft - Intricate Dances for a Chaotic Future
New York, NY, April 30, 2025 — The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art is proud to announce the opening of the 2025 mowna Biennial, an innovative exhibition that explores the relationship between art and its rapidly evolving digital landscape. This wild and newfangled exhibition gathers 66 artists from 25 countries through a rigorous open call for submissions, showcasing a diverse array of artistic expressions that challenge conventional narratives.
As the world confronts pressing issues such as climate change, class disparities, and the ongoing erosion of privacy, the 2025 mowna Biennial invites critical introspection on the implications of creating and experiencing art in a digital world and how art can act as a catalyst for change. With a vibrant array of works from emerging and established artists, the Biennial seeks to provoke meaningful conversations about the role of art in shaping our interconnected realities.
"Art is the spark, a catalyst where natural and artificial coalesce, where truth collides with imagination. We burn the old to build the new, weaving beauty from chaos, and in the radical empathy of shared creation, the future is ours to dreamcraft," says joey zaza, founder and curator for mowna.
The 2025 mowna Biennial amplifies voices from the margins, utilizing artistic practice as a powerful catalyst for community engagement and social change. The artists in the Biennial bring forth a collection of dualities; themes and their counterthemes. They include surviving and thriving, scarcity and excess, violence and peace, refusal and acceptance, chaos and order, natural and artificial, and destruction and dreamcrafting; themes that reflect the urgent challenges faced by society today. mowna embraces the potential of Web3 technologies, which disrupt traditional art systems and encourage innovative forms of interaction and collaboration among artists and audiences alike.
"With everything that is going on, to use one's own valuable time to make art is a radical action which pushes back against the attention economy. Imagination is our greatest resource and art acts as an interface to help us process, reflect, refuse, and reimagine. We must fight to reclaim our time, attention, and rest to inspire space for imagination, space for creativity, space for fun, play and healing to happen. That is the work." says cari ann shim sham*, mowna curator and founder.
In a time when established institutions struggle to adapt, the mowna Biennial serves as a revolutionary platform prioritizing the needs of artists and their communities over speculative investment. As the exhibition celebrates radical creators who push beyond boundaries, mowna reaffirms their commitment to equity and accessibility by offering the Biennial free to all attendees. Exhibitions will be available online at mowna.org and within the metaverse in partnership with Loop Art Critique, allowing audiences to engage regardless of geographic or financial constraints.
In alignment with the museum's mission to support artists, mowna continues the practice of artist compensation, ensuring that 70% of sales from works minted on the blockchain go directly to the creators, and 30% provide income for the museum to continue its mission. This financial model uplifts individual artists and also reinforces the foundation for future exhibitions, fostering a thriving creative ecosystem. A collection of artworks will be minted on the Tezos blockchain in collaboration with the museum and will be available for purchase on the objkt platform on May 1, 11 AM ET at https://objkt.com/collections/exhibitions/projects/2025-mowna-biennial-31549458.
The 2025 mowna Biennial features an exceptional group of artists working across a multitude of mediums, including interactive installations, virtual and augmented realities, generative artificial intelligence models, spatial webbuilding, cinematic experiences, digital paintings, video art, world building, and memes. Each piece provides a unique perspective on how artists navigate and interpret their environments amidst rapid change and uncertainty.
Chicago based mowna darling, Sky Goodman's "Nowhere Room's" digital sculptures are "inspired by the bedrooms in Gregg Araki's 1997 film, 'Nowhere.' The film opens by saying 'LA is like Nowhere...everyone here is lost.' As you move through the film there is a sense of being nowhere and disembodied, yet the rooms of all the characters are so completely grounded in style‚ walls filled with maximalist wallpaper or posters, the hum and glow of CRT TVs casting a warm light throughout, each room an extension of the person in it. These rooms I've made are created for my creatures from my Friends and Avatars series. These are creatures born from an imaginary video game universe. Their style and aesthetic are MS DOS Expressionism. Glitch Art for the age of Artificial Intelligence. The posters, rugs, and whatever they are watching on TV come from this style," says Sky, whose digital sculptures were created using virtual reality software, various AI processes, and Blender.
Sahar Moussavi, an Iranian Techspressionist, whose work "The Surreal Garden" is described by the artist as follows. "In a surreal and futuristic landscape, delicate pink trees impossibly sprout from smooth, reflective metal spheres, challenging the boundaries between nature and technology. The interplay of vibrant, organic growth against the stark, artificial surfaces creates a mesmerizing spectacle. Each tree stands as a testament to the harmonious coexistence of the natural and the engineered, defying conventional expectations and inviting viewers to reimagine the possibilities of our ever-evolving world."
Riniifish's "Bubbles & BBQ Bash" springs from "an intimate observation of tiny beings, insects, and microorganisms that mirror our own social dynamics. Through playful yet profound visuals, the work explores how these minuscule creatures, in their intricate dances and communal gatherings, reflect the deeper patterns of our collective consciousness. It's a joyful meditation on how the smallest organisms embody the same fundamental rhythms of connection and celebration that define our human experience."
Lineadeluz is a genderqueer, first-gen, Latinx from the United States raised in Compton, CA in a Mexican immigrant household. Their work "Is this my gender?" is a video self-portrait where the artist presents the malleability of digital self-expression. "Witnessing a ritual of self-exploration, we see filters function as masks and the selfie as a mirror. The repeating query "is this my gender?" allows the audience to affirm or challenge the artist's identity, mimicking the oscillating tension between censorship and freedom of expression that comes with sharing oneself on social media. This portrait simultaneously chronicles the artist's embodiment while alluding to the friction between personal expression and tech infrastructure imbued with gender norms. The artwork highlights the impact of technology on self-representation and collective history-making. Through the ubiquitous selfie, it underscores the significance of vernacular image practices in enabling historically marginalized groups to craft their own narratives. Ultimately, it invites reflection on how photographic technology impacts how we depict ourselves."
Negin Ehtesabian is a Techspressionist artist from Iran who currently lives in Germany. Her work "In Prison" unpacks a quote from an activist woman, imprisoned for years, who once said: "You think you are fighting for grand ideals, but then you find yourself imprisoned, where you find out that you have to spend every day of your life fighting for small basic things, having food, seeing the sky, walking in the fresh air, or even fighting with fellow inmates over a towel, a piece of cloth or a face cream. Perhaps the harshest price you pay is not just the loss of freedom, but the disillusionment that follows. You start to question the cause, living among those you once believed could help create a better world, only to confront the stark reality of your situation."
Nina Sobell's new work "GammaTime" visually represents and sonifies participants' brain waves onto a large scale video projection. Whenever each participant reaches a state of 40 Hz gamma brain activity, their section of the tableau lights up in response with a combination of light, sound, and real-time data. A dynamic background of geometric color fields, with sampled and synthesized sounds, react to gamma, beta, alpha, and theta brain waves that participants will be able to recognize.
The provocative work of Judith Carlin explores "the human condition, our stories, and how we treat each other as a continual theme. We're living in strange times and as an artist I feel the need to address that. I'm trying to paint our world with a compassionate and empathetic eye. The sadly ongoing issues I'm addressing in this group of paintings are sex trafficking in Window 'Dressing', fear, anxiety and loss of control in 'My Worlds Are Colliding', isolation and future pandemics/plagues in 'Is Anyone Out There?' and school shootings in 'School Daze.' Ultimately, I like my art to bring light and conversation to social/humanitarian issues."
Techspressionist co-founder Patrick Lichty's NERF reconstructed avatar portraiture was created from one of his portraits from Dubai. It misses his hair and has an otherworldly glow, but fits his philosophy that we have errors in translation when we go from the physical to the virtual.
Long time mowna artist, Benna Gaean Maris who is an "Interdisciplinary alien being exhibiting on planet Earth with the purpose to raise awareness among terrestrials about human, social, metaphysical and environmental issues, expressing through a whole range of art disciplines, either material or immaterial, favouring the use of poor materials and minimalism", has a work that confronts viewers with the statement "you are a SIM", provoking us to realize that often naught we are the product.
mowna reaffirms their belief that art must evolve and engage with contemporary issues, exploring, questioning, and celebrating the wild and the newfangled. The museum extends their deepest gratitude to our community for championing these vital dialogues and supporting the artists who boldly envision a more equitable and inclusive future.
Join mowna as they traverse this unprecedented terrain of digital art, manifesting a world of boundless possibilities. The 2025 mowna Biennial opens May 1 and runs through Sept 28th, 2025.
Artists:
Aaron Oldenburg, Alieneta Firdausi, Andrew Reach, Ann Reva Shapiro, Annette Weintraub, Arnau Tàsies, Avideh Salmanpour, Ayaz Yıldız, b1i5z, Béatrice Coron, Benna Gaean Maris, Chalda Maloff, connectedoom, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Cynthia DiDonato, Daniel Kantor, Deann Stein Hasinoff, Demon Ego, Dr Kim Hamilton, Eddie Lohmeyer, Gabriel Nebular, goodbytes, Gregory Little, Gregory Patrick Garvey, guruguruhyena, Irene D'Antò, Javier Aparicio Frago, Jody Zellen, Jonathan Barbeau, Judith Carlin, Judith Jacobs, Karen LaFleur, Kels, Larry Akers, Lee Day, Lee Musgrave, Lineadeluz, Lucy Boyd-Wilson, Madam Memoticon, Malavika Mandal Andrew, Meenah Nehme, Michael Pierre Price, Michael Woodruff, Mike Wrathell, Mikołaj Czyżowski, Negin Ehtesabian, Nina Sobell, Patrick Lichty, Pierre Gervois, Rangga Purnama Aji, Renata Janiszewska, Resatio, Riniifish, Ronald Walker, Roz Dimon, Sahar Moussavi, Sara Radomirović, Sky Goodman, Stephen Pare, Susan Detroy, Systaime, Tamas Antal, Theodore Lee Jones, treeskulltown, Xiaobi Iris Pan, XKPRX
About mowna
The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art provides an international online platform for the most timely, diverse, wild, and newfangled artists in the world. mowna empowers artists by exhibiting their artworks, and paying them, by curating, displaying, and supporting art through the incorporation of innovative technologies. mowna offers the preservation of artworks through an online collection, and commits to providing the public with an accessible space for art from a diverse range of global artists. mowna is a humane and sustainable museum that allows for equity, experimentation, individuality, and authenticity, and seeks to create an ever changing, fun, thoughtful, beautifully designed space to encourage awareness and mindfulness for the highest good of all. The museum was co-founded by cari ann shim sham* and joey zaza in 2020 and is based in New York City.
About Loop Art Critique
Loop Art Critique (LAC) merges the concept of gesamtkunstwerk with digital and traditional art critique, inspired by historic salons. It fosters deep, artist-to-artist conversations through a jury-selected process which focuses on art not artist backgrounds. Over four weeks, these discussions lead to a joint curatorial project, contrasting with shallow social media exchanges. LAC promotes privacy and meaningful interaction, reinventing digital art critique in a secure, supportive community space.
Members of the museum enjoy benefits such as entry to exhibitions, access to the museum's digital art collection, and other perks. Support for mowna via membership can be found at https://www.mowna.org/members
To experience mowna please visit https://www.mowna.org
2025 mowna Biennial Press Assets
The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art is open to working with press that places the interests of humanity among its priorities.
Images, video, and interviews available upon request.
For press pass and inquiries please send a message to info@mowna.org