(Super)Models
Mayrit Biennial 2026
Co - Curator with Mohammad Salemy
INTERMEDIA Matadero Madrid
The word model derives from the Latin modulus, meaning measure. A model simplifies and idealizes, making something complex usable. Models appear in science and architecture, in legal codes, in the recommendation algorithms shaping what we read and watch, in the large language systems answering our questions. They begin as tools. A (Super)Model is what a model becomes when it outgrows its origins and starts producing the world it was built to describe.
(Super)Models accumulate through scale and adoption. Some arise gradually, through trial and error; others arrive suddenly, carried by the force of consensus. Once established, they shape perception across vast domains at once. The International Style in architecture that came to define postwar urban landscapes worldwide is one example. The neoliberal frameworks restructuring global economies from the 1980s onward is another. Today, generative AI systems are perhaps the most visible (Super)Model of our moment: infrastructures of expectation so deeply embedded in daily life that they pass as neutral.
The exhibition takes this as its starting point. (Super)Models are not innocent. They embed speculative and critical thinking into templates for action while operating as black-box systems, obscuring their own logic and narrowing what counts as thinkable. They produce bodies, regulate behavior, normalize exclusion. They also preserve ideas across time, make complex realities actionable, and occasionally open futures that would otherwise remain foreclosed.
(Super)Models brings together artists, architects, designers, and researchers to sit with this ambiguity. The works here treat models as objects of inquiry: asking how they are implicated in the social stakes of artificial intelligence, the failures of democratic governance, the violence of classification, and the closing-off of futures that do not fit available templates.
The exhibition pursues what its organizers call Floating Fields: territories where models become visible as artifacts, rather than as given conditions. To look at a model from outside its own jurisdiction is already to find room to move.
(Super)Models accumulate through scale and adoption. Some arise gradually, through trial and error; others arrive suddenly, carried by the force of consensus. Once established, they shape perception across vast domains at once. The International Style in architecture that came to define postwar urban landscapes worldwide is one example. The neoliberal frameworks restructuring global economies from the 1980s onward is another. Today, generative AI systems are perhaps the most visible (Super)Model of our moment: infrastructures of expectation so deeply embedded in daily life that they pass as neutral.
The exhibition takes this as its starting point. (Super)Models are not innocent. They embed speculative and critical thinking into templates for action while operating as black-box systems, obscuring their own logic and narrowing what counts as thinkable. They produce bodies, regulate behavior, normalize exclusion. They also preserve ideas across time, make complex realities actionable, and occasionally open futures that would otherwise remain foreclosed.
(Super)Models brings together artists, architects, designers, and researchers to sit with this ambiguity. The works here treat models as objects of inquiry: asking how they are implicated in the social stakes of artificial intelligence, the failures of democratic governance, the violence of classification, and the closing-off of futures that do not fit available templates.
The exhibition pursues what its organizers call Floating Fields: territories where models become visible as artifacts, rather than as given conditions. To look at a model from outside its own jurisdiction is already to find room to move.