Bill’s PC is honoured to present Something for Everyone, a solo presentation of work by Olia Lialina.

Something for Everyone (2017) consists of four small advent calendars, which have been customised and manufactured by a print-on-demand service in Germany. Each year, Olia’s husband – Dragan – orders a calendar for each of the four members of their family. Working within the at-hand material conditions of the internet, he searches for images online, selecting those which he decides would be likely to make each of them happy. These found images are then ripped from their initial contexts and added to the cardboard calendars using the print-on-demand service option for ‘image customisation’.

Exhibiting the empty advent calendars from 2016 as readymades, Lialina presents a cross-section of her family’s taste. Through presentation of these private family objects within contemporary art and gallery contexts, Lialina intends to point towards the power of cultural industries, the pervasive nature of images, and their transformations through niche markets. The title of the work is borrowed from Adorno’s essay The Culture Industry; “something is provided for all so that none may escape”; whilst also alluding to Tim Berners-Lee’s “This is for everyone”.

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Born in Moscow (1971) and now based in Germany, Olia Lialina is a network-based art pioneer, frequently cited among the most celebrated and best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene. Her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web – in both artistic and publishing projects – has made her a significant figure across contemporary art practice and new media theory.

Her work has been exhibited extensively both online and at in-person venues, including the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Western Front, Vancouver; and/or, Dallas/LA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York; Barbican, London; LEAP, Berlin; MOTI, Breda; HEK, Basel; The Kitchen, NY; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

She is cofounder and keeper of the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany.