The freedom to create spaces, narratives and imagined scenarios outside of our realities are an intrinsic part of the redefinition of our future. Jabbar believes digital art is a promising tool for this, as it allows for independence and control over one’s expression and it has the potential to go viral quickly. Therefore distribution and giving it the correct exposure plays a significant role in it and why the work of platforms like HERVISIONS is so important.

Jabbar studied graphic design at Central Saint Martins in London and was soon drawn to the magic of moving image. After graduating she started working as a director for music videos and commercials, and it’s the frustrations that she experienced working in a white male dominated industry, together with the art that she was discovering in solitude through social media, that led her to look into post-internet art and post-internet aesthetics and wanting to explore more femme focused moving image practices. That culminated in her founding HERVISIONS, a multidisciplinary platform that supports and promotes non-binary and female-identifying artists working in new media.

Zaiba Jabbar is keeping busy during this lockdown period, working with Arebyte Gallery on a project titled “The Art of no Likes”, which, as many of the other things she does, is interdisciplinary and very experimental. It will be a year-long shapeshifting research project that tries to understand the economy of like and the standardisation of popularity that we have been conditioned to look at through social media platforms. It’s a critique to the systems that she and all of us have been inhabiting while trying to understand what the alternatives are, and whether we can exist in this system and out of it and how that would look like.