Sonic Acts and Rupert are pleased to announce that Ukrainian visual artist Olena Newkryta has been selected for the ALTERLIFE residency – a collaborative research and production programme running from 2026 to 2028. This joint initiative between Sonic Acts (Amsterdam) and Rupert (Vilnius) supports interdisciplinary artists and collectives in developing bold, process-led work that engages critically with the climate emergency and the complex conditions it reveals.

Olena Newkryta is a Ukrainian visual artist based in Vienna. Her research-driven practice is rooted in moving images and multimedia installations, exploring the material, historical, and socio-political dimensions of our techno-social environment. A central focus of her work is the entanglement of human labour within technological infrastructures – for instance as in Patterns Against Workers (2023). This film addresses the state of collective exhaustion not only as a pathologic symptom of capitalism’s exploitative forces, but as a socio-political condition that bears the potential for resistance – by becoming radically unruly.

During her residency, she will produce a short film that explores how mental health is affected by digital technologies and exhaustive systems of data extraction. In recent years, brain research and visualisation tools such as fMRI have helped turn neurological activity into a valuable resource for tech industries. From emotion-tracking software to sleep monitoring apps and cognitive enhancement devices, a growing number of platforms promise to improve mental well-being. At the same time, issues such as anxiety, insomnia and burnout gain prevalence. The film responds to this tension by examining how psychological distress is increasingly linked to economic pressure, surveillance, and the demand for constant self-optimisation.

Newkryta draws on her ongoing research into how technological infrastructures reflect and reproduce social and political conditions. Her work connects present-day mental health technologies to longer histories, including the role of psychiatry and cybernetics, and asks how these histories continue to shape both digital systems and emotional experiences. Using a mix of documentary and speculative methods, the film reimagines spaces where these dynamics come into focus, from clinical environments to virtual platforms. The project asks whether moving image works can function as technologies of care – and whether alternative, collective models of support might offer resistance to the individualising logic of current mental health systems.

About ALTERLIFE
ALTERLIFE is a joint residency programme that supports the development of a new artwork over a three-month period, split between Vilnius and Amsterdam, and culminating in a new commission to be presented at both Rupert in 2026/2027, and the Sonic Acts Biennial in 2028. Organised for the second time, the residency takes its name from feminist scholar Michelle Murphy’s concept of alterlife – a term that captures how life, both human and non-human, has been chemically and structurally shaped by centuries of colonial and capitalist systems.

This year, the curatorial teams of Rupert and Sonic Acts welcomed proposals that go beyond highlighting the environmental impact of the climate emergency, and instead interrogate the cultural, political and historical forces shaping our collective future. As Murphy says, ‘embodiment does not provide a respite or escape from history, from infrastructures, from relations of power.’ In this spirit, ALTERLIFE encourages a process-led artistic approach informed by speculative thought and critical inquiry. Taking inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation – experimental storytelling that reclaims obscured histories and proposes alternative realities – artists are invited to imagine new ways of being, relating and creating.

ALTERLIFE is part of New Perspectives for Action, a collaboration between Rupert (LT) and Sonic Acts (NL) and a project of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.