Interview: Trisha Baga at Société, Berlin

Trisha Baga, MORE (2025). 3D stereoscopic single channel video. (All photos: Joe Clark)

Trisha Baga: MORE
7 NOV 2025 - 17 JAN 2026 
SOCIÉTÉ
Wielandstraße 26
10707 Berlin

By JEFFREY GRUNTHANER, November 26th, 2025

Entering Société’s translucent glass doors and encountering MORE, Trisha Baga’s brilliant solo exhibition on view through mid-January, one’s vision initially struggles to adjust to the darkness permeating the space. The fact that several works incorporate projectors has only a little to do with this. In line with the themes and images Baga invokes, the darkened ambience lends itself to a kind of behind-the-eyes interiority—a tucked-away world where the mind can watch itself dream.

Immediately to the right are ceramic pieces recreating desktop icons, arranged in constellations around the image of a small child in her crib. Already, the juxtaposition of media—the tactile tradition of ceramics set against the more algorithmic and impersonal logic of digital imagery—is striking, to say the least.

Particularly when I was watching Baga’s 40-minute video work, which forms the centerpiece of the show, I noted how memory plays a conspicuously inconspicuous role in these works. Alluding to “pop culture,” or to millennial-coded imagery generally—Toy Story, 3D glasses, The Thing, all manner of creatures sourced from the black lagoon of our collective subconscious—the video felt like it was reconstructing memory in a way impossible for other media (including VR) to mimic. The hallucinating presence of two-dimensional images rendered in stereoscopic three-dimensions heightened this impression.

Across the exhibition, media and materials converge. Ceramics become sigils of digital icons; paintings become luminous, sheltering light borrowed from the colored rays of a projector; and video, shedding its too-literal qualities of stabilized, objectified selfhood (think Rosler, Acconci, or even Trecartin) becomes spatialized poetry—environing viewers in a mysterious thematic core that feels more storied than narrative.

I wanted to ask Baga about creative influence, how memory informs these works as an aesthetic phenomenon, and how technology transduces tradition within a darkly cinematic space.

Jeffrey Grunthaner: To me, it seems that you're reframing impersonal technologies so that they have the depth and feeling of something much more personal. What motivates you, as an artist, to reconfigure technology so that it projects the environing ephemerality of memory? 

Trisha Baga: This question just makes me see my scanner bar at the party scene, so I will talk about that first. In that example, the scanner bar is a metaphor provided by an analog technology, which I’m using to recreate the process of human memory recollection. Almost the inverse of what you're talking about..?

Installation View: Trisha Baga, MORE (2025) 

Compositionally, it’s a way to impress only fragments of a scene at a time—but in enough motion and in time—to easily surmise what’s happening in the darkness. And the fragmentation makes it more amenable to being layered. Which I think is a good reconstruction of how memory actually works. Because memory is actually so indirect; we recreate a memory each time we recall it; it’s made out of all sorts of random shit that isn’t the original experience: and part of the compositional challenge as an artist is how to compress all these sources into one coherent image space 

Trisha Baga, Emotions (2025). Oil on glazed ceramics 

The scanner bar, though, is so analog and friendly—so clear in its otherness. Technology, as it gets more digital and more AI-powered, is increasingly invisible, but it's also so invasive. The more it reflects and responds to us, the more it shapes us in ways we can’t see. I want to be able to see it. Because it’s made out of us—our data, our images, even our desires—in that it’s the supply to our demand. But it’s also made out of giant corporations, and we’re absorbing this corporate psychology while at the same time providing it with the materials (made out of very human experiences) it needs to mirror us. It’s always important to see the thing that controls you. 

JG: I love how different traditions overlap in these works. Pretty much everything in MORE combines some ratio of ceramics, painting, and video. Do any particular themes you bring up seem right for one particular medium, as opposed to others? Do you already know beforehand how these disparate media will link up thematically? 

TB: I never know anything beforehand. 

I think it’s the friction between the media that's most important to the work. The ways they each have to bend in the direction of each other helps reveal the limits of each medium; and seeing the way something behaves at its limit, is a great way to make visible its defining qualities. 

Trisha Baga, MORE (2025) (video still)

Stereoscopic 3D video is so important to me as a container for all content because it’s a way of looking at the image that we’re not yet desensitized to. It’s a weirdly sensual experience to watch these layers of 3D video—and it feels personal because your eye moves through it differently than the person next to you watching it. And it feels present because your eye moves through it differently the second time you watch it from the first time. Stereo 3D has forever been a “futuristic medium,” but it’s never really taken off—I think because it’s so clunky, it’s hard to convince a body to be in it for prolonged periods of time. 

JG: What role do you see memory playing in your show? 

TB: I think about time travel a lot. In practice, for me, using Stereo 3D video recordings of a single light source, and pushing that information through a projector, functions as a “time travelling flashlight”—especially when the recorded light source is aligned with the angle of the camera, and thus the angle of the projector. It’s like lining up beams of light through time and space, to collect the objects that are in its way. But really, my art practice is a way of engaging the part of my brain and my memory that isn’t verbal, and isn’t solely visual.

Trisha Baga, Scruffy logic (2025). Video projection on oil on canvas, oil on glazed ceramic (one element)

I think of art—all art—as a way to make experiences and emotions time travel in ways they can’t through other more purposeful, intention-saturated containers.  There’s a language that functions to speak to the time and place it occupies: and it’s specific and direct and serious and industrial. And then art is like this weirder language that speaks beyond that, across time and space, and has to constantly be reinvented in order to evade dulling forces like quantification and pure representation. And I do think that that transmission is dependent on a collective memory of the human experience; something completely inaccessible to computers and the way they think.

Trisha Baga, Emotions (2025). Oil on glazed ceramics

Human memory and computer memory operate completely differently. And while more imprecise, there are things we remember with our bodies, things that can’t be translated into bits of data or spreadsheets. I think these are also the things that make it possible for us to have art experiences, as viewers and as makers, and also why I think it’s impossible for computers to ever actually experience art. Only so much can be transmitted via command lines and data inputs, and that’s what computers are made out of.

JG: As someone who’s new to your work, I’m curious how you contextualize this particular exhibition in relation to exhibitions past?

TB: This was my first video show since before the pandemic.

3D video editing stopped being supported on consumer grade computers between the years 2014 and 2024. I still made 3D video through 2019, but on an old relic of a computer that you could practically hear wheezing every time I pressed a button. I was one of the oldest hold-outs using FCP7, but as a result, I had to keep my computer and operating system frozen in time. In 2020,  I was so sick of being dependent on the whims of technology companies to access my medium, that I decided to learn how to paint. The logic was that no one could ever have a monopoly on Ultramarine Blue, for example. From 2020-2024 I just painted. I started by painting reflections of my studio in my dusty computer screen, and let it spiral out from there. Painting is cool because it's so hormonal. There’s no way to control the amount of moods a painting can absorb, and you can’t actually undo anything. Time is there but somehow in a more rigid way than the time based media I was used to.

Trisha Baga, MORE (2025) (video still)

In 2024, Apple finally released a codec along with their Apple Vision Pro, that enabled (kind of as a side effect) the editing of stereoscopic 3D video again in FCP11. This is my first video project in the new program, on a new computer and operating system (where AI assistance options keep popping up no matter what), and after 4 years of mainly painting and working with my hands. 

Trisha Baga, detail of CRYPTID (2025). Video projection, stretched canvas, oil on glazed ceramics 

This was also my first show as a parent. It feels like a giant leap into the future, materially and psychologically. The amount of STUFF new computers can process at a time feels obscene. It makes clearer the limits on the amounts of stuff my brain can process at a time, because it didn’t make the actual art-making any faster in the end. 

JG: Is there any kind of overarching narrative framing these works? And if so, how do you push against it, or outpace its linear hooks?

TB: I actually think of narrative as something that I find—or something that happens, or is recognized—as these various materials and images and THINGS coalesce. Which is maybe distinct in process and dynamic from what you propose: a framework that’s pushed against. The narrative, or pattern that emerged, was Hunger, which is why the video is called “MORE.”  The handmade ceramics with my loving images of my life—mixed up with screenshots of tax documents, etc.—these comprise all the data that the very hungry computer-caterpillar chomp chomp chomps through to become a beautiful butterfly.

Trisha Baga, detail of CRYPTID (2025) 

When I started making MORE, I knew I wanted to use layered stereoscopic video to process two things until I found the place where they met: Infancy and machine learning technology. As a new parent in this era, these were the two things that were colonizing my days, one in a very intimate bodily sense, and the other as a consumer and producer of media. 

Trisha Baga, MORE, 2025 (video still)

On a practical level, they were also things I had a lot of material access to. And when you’re a new parent, “within arm's reach” is crucial. I had a feeling if I took both of these in the direction of the other, I would end up somewhere pretty Freudian, and I wasn’t wrong. I think it worked out because of the enormity and scale of my starting points. And maybe Freudian logic is a kind of narrative, but I never felt that it was imposing, at least not as it manifests in the artwork. My work is so loose about the figure/ground relationship…in that the voice and body and the subject are constantly transforming through each other and through different materials and containers. I think because of this, conventional narrative is automatically undone; it’s an immediate casualty of my process and perspective. 

JG: For all its allusions to digital space (computer screens, app icons, the program you used that insists on a “primary storyline”), I’m wondering if the works in MORE, however tacitly, allude to specific topographies: memories of architectural encounters with space. Maybe certain rooms are invoked?

TB: To me, it’s not art if I know what I’m doing. So my work comes from a place of the subconscious, and that’s where I want my viewer to be when they watch it.  And because of how embedded technology is in our lives, these digital spaces are intertwined and interfaced with and by extremely intimate physical spaces. The main spaces in MORE are my current studio, my child’s bedroom, my childhood home, and the current desktop of my computer. The places that are kind of the root of everything I dream about.  

Installation View: Trisha Baga, MORE (2025) 

To lay out the literal embeddedness I refer to: I edited the whole work on my computer while watching and listening to the baby monitor, which is a live camera feed of my child’s bed that appears in a window on my computer behind the editing application. 

JG: Are there any particular artists you’re reimagining by juxtaposing different media? What’s your relationship to art history?

TB: It’s complicated because when I’m inside my process, everything I encounter I think of as material—even if it comes from art I really love. So it doesn’t feel like I’m thinking about art when I am making art. Just material. But in a general sense, the work of Pam Lins, Kidlat Tahimik, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Robert Altman, Maria Bamford, Joan Armatrading, has influenced me greatly. And there’s nothing that I think about more than Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy. All my favorite work—MORE included—started with me tricking myself by saying: “I’m going to base this work on (so and so) aspect of the Xenogenesis Trilogy.” MORE is pretend-based on DAWN, the book about infancy. WM