Twenty-Six Artists the Algorithm Tried to Disappear
The content moderation logic Facebook and Instagram use has always been strange, but by 2018 it had become genuinely surreal: a photograph of a human nipple triggers automated removal within hours, while coordinated harassment campaigns and recruitment material for violent movements sit in the queue for months pending "review." The naked body—the most common thing in human history—is a crisis. Everything else, apparently, requires nuance.
The Uncensored Berlin exhibition, which opened at the Blogfabrik in Kreuzberg, is a direct response to exactly that logic. Twenty-six Berlin artists whose work has been removed, flagged, or shadow-banned for depicting the human form were given wall space and no content policy. The results are predictably varied—some pieces coyly implicit, some completely forthright—and collectively they make the point without needing a caption: there is nothing dangerous about this.
Frank R. Schröder, who curated the show for I Heart Berlin, called it one of the most creatively fulfilling projects in recent memory.
After previous exhibitions built around animated GIFs, Berlin portraits, and street photography, social media censorship felt like the inevitable next subject—it’s the context all of these artists have been working inside, whether they want to or not. These 26 artists show an incredibly diverse body of work,
he said, and we’re very happy to have gathered so many artistic perspectives in one place.
What strikes me about this kind of show isn’t the radicalism of the content—most of it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in any gallery context—but what it reveals about where we’ve collectively let the platforms take us. Artists are now making strategic decisions about what to post, what to crop, what to leave unpublished, based on rules written by a content moderation team in Menlo Park. We’ve agreed to pre-censor ourselves so that algorithms built to serve advertisers don’t penalize our reach. An exhibition in a Kreuzberg warehouse shouldn’t feel like an act of defiance. But here we are, and it does.