Whose Art Is This?
A project by Dani Hasrouni
Artificial Intelligence (AI)has evolved rapidly in recent years, becoming a tool not only for recognizing images but also for creating them, raising important questions about authorship, authenticity, and the future of art.
In this project „Whose Art Is This?“, I deliberately ‚tricked‘ AI into re-creating/ generating my photographic series Fractured Reality – a project rooted in my personal vision, cultural symbols, and historical memory. By feeding the machine detailed descriptions of my own original work, I allowed it to generate artificial adaptations of my originals. The results are flawless, smooth, but hollow. These images were made without my camera, my models, or my hand, yet they still bear the shadow of my vision, or the machine’s distorted echo of it.
This experiment raises unsettling questions:Who owns this art? When AI can effortlessly replicate style and meaning, what remains of the artist’s originality?
What now defines truth in art? And can it come into being without lived experience, or without an artistic soul behind it? Could the machine understand the irony of bubble wrap or the quiet power of a keffiyeh?
How does AI reproduce not just appearances, but our preferences, behaviors and biases? And what happens to human creativity when machines replicate our styles, symbols, and cultural memory?
As Walter Benjamin foresaw, infinite reproduction threatens to erode the ‚aura‘ of art, its uniqueness and its connection to human presence. Today, AI accelerates this erosion, blurring the line between creation and imitation, shaping a world where art can be endlessly copied but no longer lived.
“Fractured Reality”– Original Series Concept
In the Fractured Reality series, Dani Hasrouni explores the unsettling condition of contemporary life where reality becomes evermore fractured and unnatural, to the degree that it has become commonplace experience, or experience questioned. His work reflects on how this normalization and distortion shapes perceptions of value, identity, and dignity in the modern world.
In Goods Woman, Hasrouni draws direct inspiration from Renaissance portraiture, a genre historically intended to idealize beauty, virtue, skill, and grace. Here, however, the context is inverted: the figure of the woman is wrapped in bubble wrap – an everyday packing material – as if she herself were a product to be displayed, consumed. This transformation critiques the commodification of the female body and identity within consumer culture, standing in stark contrast to the humanist ideals of Renaissance art that partially inspired the work.
In the second photograph, Hasrouni references the sacred iconography of the Madonna and Child – a timeless image of tradition, protection, tenderness, and purity. The woman, wrapped in a dark red keffiyeh and holding a child, evokes this conventional visual language, but the familiar elements carry new meaning. The keffiyeh, now a symbol of resistance and struggle, and the quotidien round of bread suspended here as a symbol of the madonna’s halo, anchor the scene in the political and human realities of the Middle East. This image is made with the intention to reflect how especially in times of crisis, women often bear the heaviest burdens of suffering and endurance, and underscores a contradiction within the tradition of idealized figures in renaissance art’s tendency toward masking even the greatest sorrows, tragedies, and burdens behind a visage of grace and beauty.
Through these works, Hasrouni confronts the tension between artistic idealization and lived reality, an alternative reality where violence, objectification, and commodification have become the invisible inner workings of daily life, and daily consumption. By invoking familiar visual forms and disrupting them with symbols of contemporary struggle, he invites viewers to question what has come to be seen as increasingly normal and acceptable