For her Frieze London 2021 exhibition, German-Iranian artist Cathrin Hoffmann was inspired by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. In this cult tome written in 1985, sci-fi artist Harroway predicts a world where women are replaced with cyborgs and questions a modern feminism where this is possible. To pose this question in real life, Hoffman riffs on digital painting, creating a 2D rending of a gaming figure that runs away from itself. In her Frieze installation, her blood red protagonist has a shadow chasing her on the ground.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway says, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”. It’s this gamification of the female body that Hoffman challenges, with her figures that twist and contort from their own reflection. She argues for a dual body type, one that is not defined by gender, but a futuristic figure defined by its own integrity.