DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign

Who controls our data, personal sovereignty, and political freedom? The exhibition offers answers.

Who controls our data, personal sovereignty, and political freedom? The exhibition DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign offers answers, where Czech and foreign artists explore in their works how computational technologies, automation, and digital infrastructures disrupt both personal and state sovereignty. Roaring lions are no longer a threat to us; today, other creatures lurk: algorithmic systems, data infrastructures, and forms of governance driven by artificial intelligence that operate beyond the reach of effective democratic control. This group exhibition heralds one of the most important struggles we will face in the coming decades: the fight for our own sovereignty in an age when data and computational technologies increasingly escape legal and political control and fundamentally reshape the freedom of human action. Algorithmic systems influence public debate, automate and manipulate decision-making, and dictate the nature of war – software code rewrites the foundations of democracy. The exhibition brings together voices from the fields of art, philosophy, and technology and examines how personal and national self-determination can survive in the face of the forces of surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism. The collection of represented works includes a wide range of forms: from interactive installations to narrative films to software art. The works not only serve as criticism but also model ethical alternatives to the digital regimes that exploit us. The exhibition is divided into three thematic constellations. The section Shadows of Leviathan addresses data as sovereign power and explores algocracy, cybersecurity, and automated governance. Another, Islands of Disobedience, focuses on various forms of infrastructure – energy grids, underwater cables, and data centers – and shows sovereignty as a form of logistical and computational power with ecological consequences. The final part of the exhibition, Songs of Refusal, turns attention to the subject and examines the fragility of personal autonomy under conditions of profiling, prediction, and surveillance, where the image becomes a functional element of control systems. –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, curator of the exhibition. The exhibition was created with the support of the European Union's Creative Europe program as part of the project DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign (2025–26), which serves as a platform for artists from Central and Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and other regions to jointly explore how computational technologies transform political power and personal self-determination. An accompanying publication of the same name is being released for the exhibition. Curator: Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás