In The Walled Garden, New York–based artist Vadim Pugin unveils a new body of work probing the contours of subjectivity in an era shaped by commodified attention and Baroque spectacle. Through ceramics, sound and video, Pugin reconstructs the architecture of control embedded in online platforms: the curated feed as endless folds of illusory abundance, the recommendation engine as a network of garden paths personalized for each visitor, and the algorithm as a sovereign force that has already determined the direction of our movement. Drawing on two decades of insider experience in advertising technology, Pugin makes the invisible machinery visible — exploring a space inside the surveillance garden where a political imagination could emerge.
