Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present Face Value, a group exhibition examining the dissolving boundaries between worth and reflection in contemporary systems of exchange, opening 15 October 2025 at the gallery's new London location.
The exhibition brings together john gerrard, Anna Ridler, Addie Wagenknecht, Rachel Maclean, FAR, and Harm van den Dorpel with Jonas Lund, each investigating how identity operates as currency through technological, biological, and economic frameworks.
john gerrard's Mirror series reconfigures the scarab beetle, that ancient Egyptian symbol of transformation and rebirth as a reflection of a natural world gripped by accelerating extinctions. Through digital cameras linked to iridescent carapaces, these creatures become involuntary reflective shells, held up to viewers who encounter their own image. The work operates as a vivid technological memento mori for an age of perpetual self-documentation, where AI-inflected virtual worlds collapse distinctions between observer and observed, technological and entomological.
From Anna Ridler comes selected pieces from The Shell Record: Breathings of the Moon, where machine-generated molluscs appear and vanish with Thames tidal patterns. These neural-networks-based visions of shells, humanity's ur-currency, remain visible and tradeable only during low tide, binding market liquidity to lunar pull. The work introduces temporal friction into systems designed for instantaneous exchange, proposing patience as a form of resistance.
Addie Wagenknecht's Untitled (forgotten) from recent series Neutralized Memories transforms Rorschach-like compositions, filtered through digital interpretation, to the very substance designed to obliterate monetary value as vehicle for exploring cognitive dissolution. These paintings are created using security ink as a base from intelligent banknote neutralization systems. The pigments are designed to render stolen banknotes unusable, and serve as a poignant metaphor for the gradual erosion of memory and identity that characterizes Alzheimer's.
Rachel Maclean presents MAMA, where bespoke AI models generate hallucinatory imagery conflating maternal and infant bodies into single, pulsing entities. The work leverages AI's inability to respect physical boundaries as formal strategy, capturing the psychedelic dissolution of self that marks early motherhood. Gendered expectations, pink ribbons and blue bows, mutate into grotesque spectacle, revealing violence embedded in idealised maternal imagery.
FAR (Francisco Alarcón), whose practice bridges digital culture and visual arts, debuts with Tender Paradise. Previously pursuing doctoral research in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University, where he co-founded the Harvard Blockchain Group at the Graduate School of Design, Alarcón presents this artwork as part of OFFSHORE, a study of the visual language of wealth, escape, and abstraction shaped by finance, fantasy, and desire.
Harm van den Dorpel and Jonas Lund present Wishing Well.biz (2013), an early work that presciently anticipated our current condition of monetised desire. This browser-based wishing well transforms the ancient ritual of coin-tossing into PayPal transaction. Created over a decade ago, the piece reads differently in 2025: what began as net art provocation now feels like documentary evidence of how thoroughly transactional logic has penetrated even our most private aspirations.
These artists collectively propose that face value, worth printed on the digital or presented in social interaction, has become the primary site of contemporary social malaise. Whether through digital self-documentation or tidal data, maternal dissolution or monetary destruction, the exhibition tracks how systems of valuation perpetually reconstitute themselves at the intersection of the biological, technological, and economic.
Artists bios
john gerrard (b. 1974, Dublin) works at the intersection of digital simulation, landscape, time-based media, and environmental systems. His practice is distinguished by the use of real-time 3D simulations that generate looping or continuously evolving imagery, often unfolding in synchrony with natural cycles. These works probe questions of energy, infrastructure, and the entanglement of virtual and physical worlds. He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (Oxford), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Trinity College, Dublin, and has undertaken residencies and affiliations with Ars Electronica (Linz), the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), among others. His work is in public collections including Tate, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Hirshhorn, IMMA, Borusan, Kistefos, and M+.
Anna Ridler (b. 1985, London) works with systems of knowledge, measurement, and classification, often creating hand-generated datasets to feed into computational processes. Her works interrogate how technologies quantify, narrate, or distort the natural world. She earned an MA in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, and a BA in English Literature & Language at Oxford. She has held fellowships (e.g. UAL Creative Computing Institute) and exhibited broadly (V&A, Barbican, Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica).
Rachel Maclean (b. 1987, Edinburgh / Scotland) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work combines lush visuals, saturated palettes, and fantastical characters to probe identity, narrative, and digital culture. She holds a BA in Drawing & Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and has exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Tate Britain, the National Gallery in London, and representation of Scotland at Venice Biennale 2017.
Addie Wagenknecht (b. 1981, Portland / US-Austrian) works at the intersection of open source systems, feminist inquiry, and media art. Her practice often engages hardware, robotic systems, and networked culture to critique visibility, autonomy, and technological infrastructure. She earned a BS in Multimedia & Computer Science from University of Oregon and an MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She co-founded NORTD labs and has held residencies at Eyebeam, Mozilla, and CERN, among others.
FAR is an artist-architect whose generative and virtual works examine the material boundaries of code and spatial logic. His projects explore how computational space “breathes” and how nature-inspired algorithms can be remixed to reshape virtual topologies. He holds an MDes in Art, Design and the Public Domain from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and an MArch from SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), and was previously pursuing a PhD in Film and Visual Studies / Critical Media Practice under the supervision of Krzysztof Wodiczko at Harvard. He also holds an MEng in Civil Engineering.
Harm Van den Dorpel (b. 1981, Netherlands) works across software, sculpture, print, and generative systems. His practice emphasizes algorithmic feedback loops, emergent systems, and the liminality between machine logic and subjective gesture. He co-founded Left Gallery, works deeply in net art lineages, and his works are held in collections such as the V&A and Stedelijk.
Jonas Lund (b. 1984, Sweden) works across painting, sculpture, web art, and performance, designing systems in which participants, algorithms, and institutional logics intersect to question agency, value, and authorship in networked culture. He earned a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam) and an MA from the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam).
