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At Salzburger Kunstverein’s CAPTCHA Realism, the question is who gets to define what being human means. For Sharmilla Ganesan, the harder question is whether she was ever meant to answer it.
\n\n\n\nOne of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
These lines come from a game that I learn during the late 1980s, watching Sesame Street on Malaysia’s national TV channel. One grid, four objects, one of which stands apart. I love it. But I don’t realise I am also being trained to sort and categorise.
\n\n\n\nSometime during the 2010s, I get used to being sorted rather than doing the sorting. Sorted as ‘human’ by a machine. I peer at blurry photos on a grid on a screen, attempting to click on every traffic light or crosswalk I can see. Hoping that it is enough to validate my humanity.
\n\n\n\nSpring of 2026, Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria. CAPTCHA Realism has become an exhibition theme. In a world mediated by machines, it asks, who gets to define what being ‘human’ means?
\n\n\n\nI come to the exhibition expecting to be sorted. I expect also that I will not see myself or my part of the world represented here. You arrive already playing the game. This is the occupational hazard of being a critic from a small, often-overlooked country while operating in Global North art spaces.
\n\n\n\nThe first encounter both draws me in and confuses me. Linda Lach’s all keys, all times (2026) is a giant latex-covered structure suspended over a large room, with what looks like a broken hull on the floor. Various smaller elements are scattered around the room, and even above it. My immediate impression is of seashores and broken boats and lost personal belongings. Is this about refugees? I wonder.
\n\n\n\nThe work is encompassing in scope, speaking through its textured surfaces. The swathes of latex shading the space feel both comforting and off-putting, while revealing shadowy objects I want to reach out and touch. The notes tell me it is exploring the flattening of identities, of achieving compatibility through standardisation. I’m uncertain whether or not my initial read belongs here. I need my familiar contexts to be concretised, while the artist is offering something more abstract. Am I only interpreting the work in this way because I came looking for it? Am I so used to being sorted out that I need a clear sign of being sorted in?
\n\n\n\nMagdalena Berger’s Certain Expectation (2026). A blue-lit installation that takes you through corridors and corners, walls displaying engraved metal plaques. The concept is familiar, a door that does not open for you, shielding a space that seems filled with pleasure. I note this and move on, thinking that there isn’t much here that might connect with me. I do this so automatically that I don’t think to question why.
\n\n\n\nI begin to wonder whether the problem might be with the way I have learned to look. The discourse around representation seems to have its own sorting logic: work either represents you or it doesn’t. Representation feels like validation, like acknowledgement. I have been running each work through a checklist I didn’t consciously choose. I want to see my part of the world, my conflicts, my familiar references. When that isn’t offered, I move on. I have been doing that all along during this Salzburg visit.
\n\n\n\nI wonder whether I am the thing that doesn’t belong. Perhaps an exhibition in Salzburg was never meant to be for me. And perhaps I’ve been insisting that it should be.
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Every day, I walk past Kateryna Lysovenko’s series of wall paintings, Creation, Catastrophe, Creation, Again and Again (2026), which snakes the entire circular ground-floor wall of the Kunstverein. These translucent, otherworldly forms – abstract organisms, bulbous plantlife, cobbled-together creatures – alternately evoke delight and horror. In some, the abundance of colour and organic shapes resemble whimsical flowers or animals that could be from a picture book. In others, humanoid figures displaying lurid internal organs stand in grotesque tableaux. And one day, something clicks. The organic forms and figures begin to feel familiar. Lysovenko’s imagery of dehumanisation begins to tell stories I recognise from back home. They make me think of communities pushed to the margins, bodies that are viewed as less than, and people who are forced to fight for recognition.
\n\n\n\nI don’t know if the absence I felt was real.
\n\n\n\nI haven’t arrived at a comfortable or neat conclusion. A part of me feels that I came expecting not to see myself here, and I did not. I guessed correctly, and won the game. I clicked on all squares that had traffic lights, so I am human. Hypothesis proven.
\n\n\n\nBut I know that I stopped looking for it at some point, and that something else became available when I did. The more I leaned into the actual feel and texture of the works – Lysovenko’s trailing colours, Lach’s stark faux-landscape, Berger’s shiny metallic surfaces – the more I could relate to them. Not because they had become more familiar, but because I had become more willing to sit with the discomfort of the unfamiliar.
\n\n\n\nSharmilla Ganesan is a writer and critic based in Malaysia, whose work explores belonging and representation in contemporary culture.
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