{"id":28664,"date":"2026-05-15T04:43:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/dubais-kanvas-lets-koopmans-wexells-digital-ruins-swallow-the-room\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T04:43:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:43:46","slug":"dubais-kanvas-lets-koopmans-wexells-digital-ruins-swallow-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/dubais-kanvas-lets-koopmans-wexells-digital-ruins-swallow-the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Dubai\u2019s Kanvas lets Koopmans &amp; Wexell\u2019s digital ruins swallow the room"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"post-detail__content blocks\">\n<p class=\"is-style-lead\">The Wild Within pushes ruin\u2011romantic digital art into a fully immersive Dubai environment, reanimating global architectural remains with lush, time\u2011based ecosystems inside Kanvas.<\/p>\n<div id=\"cn-block-summary-block_98130aa4748a769fad3ec315c91ec411\" class=\"cn-block-summary\">\n<div class=\"cn-block-summary__nav tabs\">\n        <span class=\"tabs__item is-selected\">Summary<\/span>\n    <\/div>\n<div class=\"cn-block-summary__content\">\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>On May 18 in Dubai, Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell are part of an immersive evening at Kanvas that extends their ongoing project The Wild Within into a multi\u2011artist environment about memory, architecture, and time.<\/li>\n<li>Their contribution blends large\u2011scale projections, time\u2011based digital works, and physical prints, transforming documented ruins from Beirut, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi and beyond into lush, animated ecosystems where vegetation, light, and atmosphere are digitally re\u2011composed.<\/li>\n<li>The project sits squarely in the lineage of digital art and art history, echoing Romantic ruin painting, post\u2011industrial photography and video installation, while using 3D, animation and immersive display tech to restage the classic \u201cnature versus architecture\u201d motif for an AI\u2011 and climate\u2011fractured present.<\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .cn-block-summary --><\/p>\n<p>The May 18 event at Kanvas is billed as an \u201cimmersive exhibition opening\u201d under the umbrella \u201cIN TIME \u2014 Where Memory and Place Continue to Change,\u201d bringing together multiple projects, including \u201cChafic Mekawi: Beirut Balconies\u201d and \u201cRyan Koopmans &amp; Alice Wexell: The Wild Within.\u201d The gallery\u2019s <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.leilahellergallery.com\/exhibitions\/ryan-koopmans-and-alice-wexell-the-wild-within\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">announcement<\/a> makes clear this is not just a static hang but a blended environment \u201ccombining physical and digital artworks, and an immersive program\u201d with curated sound, large\u2011scale projections and spatial staging designed for viewers to move through layered screens and architectures.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, The Wild Within (installation view). Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, 2025-2026. Courtesy of the gallery.<br \/><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Koopmans and Wexell stage immersive May 18 environment in Dubai<\/h2>\n<p>Within that frame, Koopmans and Wexell are effectively exporting and re\u2011staging The Wild Within\u2014originally on view at Leila Heller Gallery in Alserkal from November 10, 2025, to mid\u2011January 2026\u2014as a time\u2011based, site\u2011responsive chapter in a new venue. At Leila Heller, the project was presented through \u201clarge\u2011scale prints and immersive screen works\u201d in which historic and abandoned buildings were documented on site and then digitally reanimated with vegetation, changing light and subtle motion, turning derelict interiors into overgrown, semi\u2011surreal biomes. In Kanvas\u2019s more explicitly immersive context, those time\u2011based pieces are foregrounded: high\u2011resolution motion works such as \u201cHeartbeats\u201d (2025), described as \u201ctime\u2011based media, adaptable to any dimensions,\u201d can be scaled across walls or multi\u2011screen arrays, so that the slow breathing of light and foliage across a ruin\u2019s fa\u00e7ade becomes an environmental condition rather than a single framed image.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"822\" src=\"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778820210_279_Dubais-Kanvas-lets-Koopmans-amp-Wexells-digital-ruins-swallow-the.webp.webp\" alt=\"Dubai\u2019s Kanvas lets Koopmans &amp; Wexell\u2019s digital ruins swallow the room - 4\" class=\"wp-image-14460850\"  ><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, Heartbeats, 2025. Time-based media, adaptable to any dimensions. Edition 1\/3 + 2AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>    <!-- .cn-block-related-link --><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"digital-art-as-arthistorical-ruin-updated\">Digital art as art\u2011historical ruin, updated<\/h2>\n<p>Conceptually, The Wild Within is a digital art project built on a very old art\u2011historical problem: how to picture ruins and the return of nature. Koopmans shoots real sites\u2014abandoned Soviet sanatoria in Georgia in earlier iterations, and, in this Dubai chapter, structures across Beirut, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi\u2014with a documentary photographer\u2019s attention to geometry, ornament and spatial rhythm. Wexell then \u201cdigitally introduces meticulously crafted vegetation, light, and motion,\u201d compositing 3D plants, animated dust, mist, and shifting atmospheres into the architectural shell so that the resulting images hover between documentation and fiction. The duo have described the process, in related statements, as \u201cbringing new life to abandoned architectural spaces,\u201d where \u201ceach work begins as an image of a physical site in transition\u201d before being re\u2011composed as a speculative ecosystem.<\/p>\n<p>Seen from digital art history\u2019s perspective, the May 18 event is a convergence point between several strands: Romantic ruin painting (Piranesi, Hubert Robert), the Bechers\u2019 typological industrial photography, post\u2011Soviet ruin tourism, and contemporary CGI\u2011driven environmental art. Koopmans\u2019 lens\u2011based origin keeps the work anchored in indexical reality\u2014these are actual buildings\u2014while Wexell\u2019s animation, coding and 3D skills push the images into the territory of time\u2011based media and immersive installation, closer to the language of Pipilotti Rist or teamLab than to straight photography.<\/p>\n<p>In Dubai specifically, the work acquires another historical charge: set against a city that has spent three decades demolishing and rebuilding itself as speculative architecture, The Wild Within uses digital tools to imagine a future in which those speculative shells are reclaimed by plants, humidity, and dust. <\/p>\n<p>In that sense, the May 18 Kanvas event is not just a promotional spin\u2011off from the Leila Heller show but an extension of the project\u2019s core thesis\u2014using immersive digital art to stage the very old fantasy of nature\u2019s return inside the newest kinds of architectural and technological space, during a time in which Dubai, and the region at large, is going through profound transformation. <\/p>\n<p>    <!-- .cn-block-related-link --><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wild Within pushes ruin\u2011romantic digital art into a fully immersive Dubai environment, reanimating global architectural remains with lush, time\u2011based ecosystems inside Kanvas. Summary On May 18 in Dubai, Ryan&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28665,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28664\/revisions\/28665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}