Trisha Baga | MORE | Galerie Société | 07.11.2025-17.01.2026

A throughline in Trisha Baga’s expansive practice is their ongoing exploration of machines as narrative creatures. Baga empathizes with the tools and systems their work engages, often invoking them as metaphors for reflection, connection, and destruction. MORE, their sixth solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, takes its title from one of the first words a child utters as well as the driving desire behind technological development: perpetual “advancement,” more data, more speed. Immersive 3D videos and constellations of ceramic works transform the gallery space into an offbeat computer desktop through which its day-to-day operations remain visible. This suspension between the everyday and bizarre is mirrored in the exhibition’s central video work, which metabolizes original footage, Hollywood films, found media, and sound. These transparent layers accumulate into a fractured tale of domestic alien encounter, unfolding amidst broader reflections on the strange ecologies and shifting power dynamics between humans and technology.

This suspension between the everyday and the bizarre is mirrored in the exhibition’s title video, an associative and recursive composition that metabolizes original footage, Hollywood science fiction, and found sound into what Baga calls “a shape-shifting other that moves through different bodies of material.” The work’s form and concept are shaped by a power struggle with new software designed to predict, suggest, and complete. Made with an editing program that insists on a “primary storyline,” MORE pushes back against such hierarchical structure with a fractalized narrative approach. Its layered construction becomes a metaphor for the antagonistic clash between human intuition and the automated logics that now seek to guide creative labor.

Installation View, Trisha Baga, MORE, 2025. Foto: Joe Clark.

Envisioned as a cyclical, regenerating loop, MORE moves from the depths of the sea to the yawning expanses of space, from caves to the Disney attraction Carousel of Progress, pausing in the relative shallows of an urban aquarium and the pulsating energy of party scenes. Shifting voiceovers guide the viewer: at times, a gentle parental figure asks questions of likeness and difference, while other voices enforce identity verification and “proof of humanity.” Hunger and mirroring structure this fantastical narrative world, linking bodies, systems, stories, and images in continual feedback loops. This dynamic is amplified through recurring references to machine learning and caregiving: Baga draws parallels between raising children and training technology, observing how both depend on repetition, care, and mimicry. “We’ve raised machines the way we raise children but without love or care or respect, and it reflects that relation back to us,” they note. Seen through this lens, technology exploits the same human instinct for connection that once guaranteed survival, a voracious hunger echoed in one of MORE’s voiceovers, drawn from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation: “It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.”

About Trisha Baga:
Trisha Baga (b. 1985, Venice, FL) lives and works in New York. Baga received the USA Fellowship Award 2024. Baga’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; CCC, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard College, Cambridge; Zabludowicz Collection, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Their immersive large-scale painting installation BODY CLOCK was exhibited at Art Basel Unlimited in 2021. That same year, their video installation HOPE illuminated the façade of Kassel’s Fridericianum on the United States election day. Baga’s work was included in the exhibition HOPE at Museion, Bolzano curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine and The Irreplaceable Human at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek. They have also participated in group exhibitions at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Ludwigshafen am Rhein; PS1, New York; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Zurich; and Julia Stoschek Foundation at ZKM, Düsseldorf, among many other venues.
Trisha Baga is part of a number of public collections including Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum, New York; among others.