Amalia Ulman, The Annals of Private History, 2015. Video essay. Courtesy: the artist and Cement Fondu, Sydney.

Featuring seminal international artworks alongside five new Australian commissions, TMI [Too Much Information] explores how technologies shape and share our emotional lives, repeatedly re-drawing public and private boundaries. The exhibition celebrates art’s unique and urgent role in continuously examining our emotional and technological entanglements, critically reflecting the messy implications of mediating our innermost thoughts and feelings, identities and personal information.

From archival video work to new digital activations, the presented works explore how the cathartic and confessional possibilities of (over)sharing has evolved with technology to lure us more powerfully and trouble us profoundly.

Drawing on the tropes of love, romance and desire, and utilising the language and aesthetics of digital culture, the artists interweave real life and fiction, transforming intimate revelations into subject matter and artistic material. Centring digital confessions of their own, imagined avatars and other people, the works evoke the connective and distributive capabilities of new technologies, promising relief from disconnection and loneliness while inciting angst, ennui and emptiness.

Beyond humour and tenderness, the works offer critical reflections on the complex entanglement of our digitised public-private worlds, acknowledging new forms of communication, self-expression and -determination. They also warn that the mediation and datafication of emotional life raises urgent evolving concerns, particularly where our fantasies and failures are rendered subject to public scrutiny, the agendas of marketing, politics and capital and systemic biases of race and gender.

Exhibited artists include Vito Acconci, Ed Atkins, Christopher Baker, Holly Childs, Xanthe Dobbie, Benjamin Forster, Brian Fuata, Ann Hirsch, Erica Scourti, Frances Stark, Amalia Ulman, Travis De Vries, and Miao Ying.