Real

Adele Tulli / Italy / 2024 / 83 min

If you want to understand 21st century visual culture, you have two options. You can distance yourself from it and try to look at it from the outside. Or you can immerse yourself in it and examine it from the inside. Italian artist Adele Tulli amazingly manages to do both at once in ‘Real’, which takes a critical look at the stream of images we both create and consume on a scale that our ancestors would never have dreamed of in their wildest imagination. But Tulli doesn’t dream of rewinding history to a romantic time before the Internet. The digital Aladdin is out of the bottle, and although the virtual worlds of social media have dissolved the boundary between dream and reality, the kaleidoscopic ‘Real’ nevertheless casts a sober and almost anthropological look at the visual culture of the new era. It’s captivating, thought-provoking and – of course – one hell of a visual trip.