Interviews with Artists
Melle Nieling
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Interview by Fiona Xintong Ye
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Published in June 2026
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This year, after many studio visits and months of development, I curated Melle Nieling’s first solo show in London at Plicnik Space Initiative, Bliss Point. With a strong focus on materiality and scenography, the exhibition tells a story about power and its infrastructure – one that thrives on opacity and simulation in the age of digital media and AI.
As the curator of this exhibition, I wanted to create an environment that is precise and felt, through close collaboration with the artist. Nieling’s daring relationship to material and experimentation made that exchange incredibly generative.
On the occasion of Bliss Point, the following is excerpted from long-term conversations in the studios and over dinners, discussing specific works in the show as well as the broader contexts and sensibilities that shape Nieling’s practice.
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I wanted to start by asking about the built environment in this show: doors, boxes, hallways. There is always this spatial suggestion of something beyond. What draws you to these surfaces?
I grew up in environments where I was an odd one out, so, naturally, I had to deal with feeling excluded. This evolved into an intrigue for closed doors signalling ‘PRIVATE’, cordoned-off areas, and basically anything opaque or inaccessible. What fascinates me is the idea of gaining entrance or insight into these spaces, not so much through invitation or acceptance, but rather through a subtle act of subterfuge. For example, I entered a very expensive art fair by creating a fake magazine website and requesting a press pass.
Throughout the development of the exhibition, the idea of “cloaking mechanism” came up a lot in our conversations. How does this manifest in your work?
I think a lot of entities feign significance or relevance through obscurity and opacity, especially in a place like the United Kingdom that’s drenched in traditionalism, conservatism, and hierarchy. More universally, it appears in all bureaucracy, but also interpersonal relationships.
The cloaking mechanism is the tool used to hide behind. It is useful if you want to hide something – in the form of a door or a login page – but also if you want to create the illusion that something is worth hiding. It’s powerful, because it suggests something is valuable and needs to be gatekept. If the police enter your flat and you quickly flush your grandmother's ashes down the toilet, you are performing a decoy, tricking the authorities into believing they have interrupted a crime. You force them to focus on a fake secret to distract them from the true crime, as a form of tactical misinformation.
I am interested in how these cloaking mechanisms can be weaponised also, both by institutions and corporations, and by me as an artist. By reversing the logic you essentially smokescreen the audience. I like it when the work facilitates an environment in which it becomes unclear what is the cloaking mechanism and what exactly is being cloaked. That ambiguity feels the most consistent with how power actually operates.
MoMA at the Bank Presents, works l-r Graceland and Rocky Top (2018), photography Marcel Vos.
When researching for an exhibition in 2018, workers for a rather prominent art shipping company told me that it isn’t uncommon for people to ship their crated art around the world, collecting paperwork, stamps, and labels along the way, without it actually going anywhere specific. This is to create the illusion that the work has a rich travel exhibiting history, and therefore an increase in value. It’s a complex, expensive, and resource-intensive (international shipping) process to embellish with faux demand and value the hidden, backstage side of the artwork that only a select group in a very small and elite market will see.
You first worked with boxes in 2018. It was a work featuring courier crates taped down with MoMA logos and stamped with warnings such as “HANDLE WITH CARE.” Since then, there have been iterations of boxes, each evoking a different context. What informed your interest in boxes?
There is a documentary I saw in 2017 and can no longer find, in which a famous painter says he keeps his paintings wrapped in bubble wrap, sealed with MoMA tape to increase the value by 30%. For the 2018 work, I thought it would be funny to recreate only this external gesture; I built wooden transport crates that were very lightweight and completely non-functional. The crates operate in a way where we ‘know’ a taped-shut crate labeled ‘FULL’ is heavy, even when it really isn’t. One of the crates was opened, revealing a lot of packing material; even though it was open, it didn’t actually give away the ‘secret’ you’d hope to discover inside – like drilling open someone’s skull and finding just a brain, not their memorised crypto wallet key. Another crate had a front panel ajar; inside was a small, carpeted and wallpapered room with a ceiling light and a cellophane-packed Elvis cut-out, revealing finally a secret, but the secret was domestically mundane.
How did that evolve into this architectural ensemble of boxes in Bliss Point?
In Bliss Point, the content of the boxes is left even more vague; they are generic, plain, and fully shut. In a technical sense, they function as black boxes. As a visitor you ‘know’ there is nothing inside, yet the aesthetic presence of the box demands it be treated like a vessel, carrying something of value. Developing the exhibition, the idea came up for a sort of pseudo-pansophical archive, fuelled in part by the AI onslaught and the danger it poses to both historical and current fact. This archive contains everything, but indiscriminately mixes real events with perception, memories, hallucinations, and so on.
I am starting to see a throughline here. Like the MoMA crates and your fake magazine website, a lot of your past work is concerned with appropriation of visual language, communication strategies, and styles of corporate architecture, internet spam, and fringe ideologies. In a way they grant a sense of legitimacy, making someone or something credible.
And this act of appropriation essentially comes down to the logic of the internet, right, which is largely citational and mimetic. Can you tell me more about your relationship with appropriation, and how that evolved through time?
I remember this trope from TV shows where a kid wants an action figure, and instead of the real deal, their mom gives them a B-brand replica, or even worse, a handmade one. It’s the subverted version of Sentimental Homemade Toy; the kid character rejects the sentimental value of the gift, because it was never about the ‘gift’ as such, but about being part of the trend, or showing off, or expressing their legitimate obsession with a TV hero. The parent clearly doesn’t understand that it is the authenticity of the original that is sought after, not the concept of the toy or gift and that a substitute does not satisfy. Perhaps it was the constant encounter with this trope as a kid that got me interested in the ‘secrets’ behind manufacturing. It is generally far more expensive to make or get manufactured a one-off knockoff than to buy the real toy.
Soul (2023) at Gossamer Fog during Gradient Descent, photography by Samuel Capps.As a teenager, I started spending lots of time on forums where people would share photoshopped images. I learned to use Photoshop instead of MS Paint and started making sigs – images that appear in the signature of forum posts. In my sigs I remediated online ads, using both the institutionally clean and visually poor aesthetics that were all over the internet at the time. I’m very interested in these visually poor images. In “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Hito Steyerl argues that they get their value through the speed of distribution, rather than their quality. But I think people’s brains have caught on. We see a poor image and we attribute it some value. The degradation of images can even be weaponised, as you see with Brexit and MAGA, where the low-res aesthetic is used to manufacture faux authenticity. The shittiness also marks an opposition to institutional polish; the jpeg artefacts are an anti-institutional watermark. It also goes in opposition to AI-generated imagery, which often suffers from being overly polished and smooth. The visual poverty frames the message as raw, human, and honest. “This image must be democratic and true, because it looks like something I could make.”
This is a fascinating point, thinking about the relationship between resolution / perfection and credibility. Recalling your fake spam ads series, there is also a strong tie to the occult and the spiritual. What role does mystics play in your work?
We all hate seeing ads, and we tend to dislike what they signify economically and culturally, so it’s cliché to criticise the people behind ads as greedy suits. I think it’s funnier to imagine them as creeps, so out-of-touch with people’s desires that they offer funeral services in exchange for some alone time with the body. Cults and religions also are also known for being manipulative, so I think it makes sense for them to exclaim: “Hey, we are a scary doomsday cult that engages in constant orgies with our leader! Do you want an easy solution to your financial troubles? Click this button! Nothing bad will happen, pinky promise!”
Besides the ads, the mystical, the occult, and the esoteric have always informed my work in different ways. Esoteric literally refers to knowledge only known by an initiated group. With my brother I used to joke about ‘esoterrorism’; the idea that you could terrorise a community by introducing arcane knowledge. I feel like that’s no longer a joke and it’s actually happening now.
Still of DreamArena: Fried Chicken (1) (2024)To me, cults represent the idea that if you collectively decide something is so, it is so. The proselytes are often escaping another, less fantastical reality. Even when life in the cult is harsh and abusive, the stern rules for behaviour and dress, the repetitive activities, and the communal sense of belonging might feel comforting, compared to a life in which you’re alone and there your suffering bears no higher purpose.
In this exhibition, this sense of mysticism is extended to Real Event (2026), a real-time generated documentary about fictional conspiracy theories, addressing broader geopolitical infrastructures such as the military, intelligence networks, trade routes, to entertainment industry, like the art market and pop culture. What inspired this work?
This work is based on the trope that recurs in all the Adam Curtis films. Every time a new event gets introduced, it is revealed to be a conspiracy, and then that conspiracy turns out to be the basis of another event. He unravels the butterfly effect. The use of language connecting each event is really simple, but impactful. In Real Event every event or conspiracy is linked by the expression “but there was something else going on…”, implying everything is linked. The computer picks segments to play that bear no real relation to one another, so you think it was just an art warehouse fire in 2009? No, it goes deeper, it was actually part of a larger military plot from 1440.
When you have an initial spark or a topic of interest, where do you start your research?
Before, I would have said the internet, but I actually find it increasingly hard to find interesting material on the internet. Things are more groomed and specifically geared to draw my attention away. Before, people would share what they found interesting, funny, stupid; now they share what gets them views. When I do find something, I always try to research both serious reading material around it and YouTube videos, Reddit posts, and 4chan greentexts. I’m interested in finding the theoretical foundations, the pop-cultural references, and the dirty secrets.
With access to all knowledge at such a saturated level, I’m finding myself mostly influenced by things I encounter casually. Seeking things out never seems to work anymore. Especially because I’m highly influenced by low-architectural elements like walls and doors, the infra-ordinary. There aren’t many resources with pictures of lightly-used-but-still-in-good-shape skirting boards. I think it’s precisely because this background noise of the built environment is so taken for granted that the similarities between them and the evil murder cults and governmental oppression become apparent: the most effective forms of control are often too boring to question.
I want to take us back to the exhibition, this time focusing on the sensorial. In the development of the exhibition, we connected over this shared interest in giving the internet a body. This led to scenography being our collaborative exhibition-making process. Of course, there is a direct reference to the broader culture of liminal spaces, and the particular psychological state they evoke, be it alienation, nostalgia, or psychosis. Do you work with/from a particular feeling?
Maybe not so much a feeling, but what often captivates me and specifically so here, are spaces designated as ‘private’. I mean this in the literal sense: you’re in a museum and there’s a door with a sign that indicates you are not authorised to enter. When you do enter these hidden spaces, they are often very liminal and transitory; sometimes they make you feel like time is frozen there, especially when there are no windows.
The doors in this exhibition – and by extension also the boxes – could be opened, rendering an inaccessible space accessible. This action somehow manifests a space that previously didn’t exist, a latent dimension. Imagination plays a big role here; a closed door might invite you to fantasise about some elusive ‘Hidden’. Even if it is only a subconscious process or an artefact of mild curiosity, it is essentially virtual space that’s being rendered. If this doesn’t happen at all, a door becomes a fully static object, a wall. I’m interested in what Benjamin Buchloh calls the ‘Aesthetics of Administration’, and how power renders itself invisible through the mundane. The closed doors reference the concept of asymmetric information: power is maintained not necessarily by what is shown, but by the strategic management of what is hidden.
In the end, it is precisely because you are not invited or wanted there, that you wish to be there. I draw a cheesy parallel to the art world, a pinnacle of gatekeeping and elitism. Isn’t the strongest motivator to be a successful artist precisely that you can’t be and won’t be a successful artist? I feel like there could be a paradox there; to be included you need to be included already.
Bliss Point, works l-r The Truth is Out There, Another Real Event (Room), Bliss Point (2026) during Bliss Point at Plicnik Space Initiative, photography by Daniel Browne. Can you talk more about the audio element in Another Real Event (Room)?
Audio is very immediate and functions as a sort of invisible parergon. Unlike a door or a box, you cannot look away from a sound; it manages the body’s comfort level in the space without being 'seen.' I’m interested in the psycho-acoustic elements of corporate and military environments – the specific hum of a server room or the directional white noise used in open-plan offices to mask private conversations. The audio in the show isn't there to 'enhance' the visuals; it’s there to enforce a specific psychological frequency.
After making You can’t run, but you can hide (2022), a slim free-standing corner with two emergency exits, I wanted to do a door that has light coming from underneath. I think the light is instrumental in creating the feeling that there is a brightly-lit office space behind this door. Coupled with the constant hum of a broken AC, office chairs moving around, landline and mobile phones ringing, it suggests the existence of that office.
The tone shifts, in honestymaxxed, however, to a kind of performative positivity, one that drives a meritocratic ideal of self-optimisation and pulls people further into a corporate temporality. What's behind these shifting tonalities?
Some of the posters fall within the field of the generic corpospeak malady that is rampant on LinkedIn; others exaggerate or subvert their positivity. You could say that the hyperpositive messaging of the corporate motivational posters contrasts with the rejective quality of closed doors and private areas. I would argue, though, that the positivity might be even more reductive. Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics argues that neoliberal control functions through a constant stream of positivity rather than the rejective “No” of a disciplinary society – which may be exemplified here by the experience of being in a space you’re not supposed to be.
The motivational posters in honestymaxxed promote ‘good behaviour’, relaxation, and a strong work ethic, establishing a veil of ‘wellness’ and human-focused productivity. For years, this type of pseudo-positive self-help messaging pervades both in offline and online spaces. It leads to environments focused on self-apologetic behaviour, pseudo-religious self-help meditation sessions followed by a matcha latte, or the exorbitant minmaxing you see nowadays in male-dominant communities, be it ones centred around dating or online gaming. These environments are ultimately more claustrophobic than overt surveillance, as it leaves no room for resistance outside of the self.
Honestymaxxed (2026) during Bliss Point at Plicnik Space Initiative, photography by Daniel Browne.Culturally, these motivational posters have a memetic quality. Especially in the early 2000s they were used as templates or ‘macros’ to modify and subvert their intention, shifting the poster from a bureaucratic, corporate control tool that instills messages of pseudo-wellness and productivity, to a tool for the dissemination of critical reflection on the post-internet corporate zeitgeist; a time in which being an entrepreneur or ‘manager’, basically means being a soft-guru. Also a time in which self-fulfilment, self-development, and self-perfection started becoming a popular hobby and simultaneously externalised online, something that has now bloomed into a full-blown warfare on your mental state through social feeds.
There is this aesthetics of neoliberal managerialism, right, that something malicious is actually underneath the positivity and innocence.
Totally. This logic is pushed to its extreme in the 1944 CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which suggests destroying an organization by insisting on doing everything "the correct way." In the exhibition, this manifests as a form of malicious compliance where performative friendliness becomes a tool of systemic breakdown.
Your work addresses this incessant loop of image production and consumption. This is echoed in your use of e-ink as a medium, where the work, while bound in a hand-painted, 3D-printed frame, is never fully static – what the viewer encounters is contingent on chance. Do you work in a similar process? Is it chance-based, iterative, or do you depart from a concrete image or reference?
Yes, there is a lot of chance and iteration in my practice. I often build back-end interfaces that allow me to click buttons to make random combinations of pre-fabricated parts or generate different elements in passes, and then I edit the ones I like, or save them directly.
It’s quite a Dadaist approach of chance and randomness, the removal of ego and the artist’s hand is relevant to me as well. This element of flux and chance in my practice continue that thread of the internet and its ever-changing state. The digital exists in this constant cycle of update – becoming, erasure, and appearance. Unlike a physical work that remains mostly fixed and is only subjected to eventual erosion over the years, the online feed is always in a process of absolute transformation. I want to move the work away from being a static object toward this ontology of the digital. Internet ads are maybe the purest expression of this ontology, as they lack any form of permanence: a page may remain similar over time, but ads change on every refresh, or even whilst you’re on the page. I consider this logic when working with computer-assisted material, in this case, the video that churns out endless conspiracies and the refreshing e-ink screen.
The ontology of the digital has completely changed, not only in the ways we produce images but also in how we consume them.
Right, I’ve been wondering about the distinction between art and content, a line that might be getting muddied right now. Early on in my practice, when I had barely made anything, I created fake works to fill my website, in a reaction to this reality. In a digital space, the ‘work’ often matters less than the fact that the slot is filled. The presence of an image is the result of a process and it is never expected that the audience engages with it for any considerable amount of time, or in a meaningful way. The audience is bombarded with information to see what sticks, no different from how attention is managed and abused in the feed.
I say this, but sometimes the content is purposefully crafted. Even amongst the slop my machine produces, I’ll hide manually made clips, segments, or images, sometimes functioning as foundation, sometimes as easter egg. In contemporary times, propaganda conspicuously masquerades as filler. It’s probably when you think you’re not engaging with content that is meaningful on any level that you’re most susceptible to manipulation. I try to translate this distinction for the gallery space; sometimes the work is actually not the ‘Work’ but a space-filler; in this case the real Work happens in the context of the exhibition or in an interaction with the viewer. In some of my video works, for example, the Work is the confusion of the viewers.
Real Event (2026) during Bliss Point at Plicnik Space Initiative, photography by Daniel Browne.This question of context, where the Work starts and ends, is something that has concerned me for quite some time. It might have started after reading Derrida’s Parergon. There is also an element of collaborative engagement with the public or institutions here. A ‘communist’ element, in the way memes are communist, not politically, but because the meaning is seized by the public once it hits the feed. Especially nowadays, images are disseminated quickly through online channels; you lose some ownership and the context of your work stops being fully yours and instead something adapted and managed by others. What to you may seem as a small detail could become the core of your work for a critic and be entered into historical archives as the main focus of your practice, changing your work. Art is not immune to Freud’s “death drive” that Derrida describes in Archive Fever.
The archive and its implications for both the artwork and its context takes a central role in my practice, or at least my thinking. The creation of the work often happens with documentation in mind. When I was younger, I was fascinated by the black and white recordings of artworks in print. The archaic reproductions and photographs made me experience the work as more monumental than it truly was. Besides establishing a contextual historic temporality or ‘of another time-ness’, they signal relevance merely by existing on the page. For someone growing up in a time where the primary mode of information dissemination is the internet, anything printed is automatically granted some degree of reverence, be it catalogues, monographs, or exhibition ephemera. We have already entered a time where early remnants on the web may be achieving the same with younger generations; the historic Poor Image is revered now.
To come back to the topic of the generated image, or the generated item more generally, I’m intrigued by what will enter the archives, or treating the ‘generated space’ as an archive, and slipping in non-generated elements to destabilise the ‘sloppiness’. It all comes down to manipulating unexpected elements, to attain control over the context or traces, but simultaneously to be aware of the inability to control this.
You can’t run, but you can hide (2022) during You’ll Never Understand What I Put You Through at a&o Kunsthalle, photography by Vex Noir.Speaking of archive, you’ve done research into Epstein files, which I find relevant in this context, in relation to your interest in the forbidden archive, esotericism, and collective consciousness.
The Epstein files are possibly the most interesting archive currently in existence; it acts as a relic that enables a global witch hunt for verifiably evil people – with the same collectivist energy that the Pokémon GO summer established 10 years ago. It both reveals and obfuscates the inner workings of an elite and his environment. It also does this on a grand scale, with large public involvement, and globally at that. The archive is ever-growing; amateurs scrutinise and dissect the pages, leaving trails of disinformation, speculation, and gossip, with the occasional potential revelation buried within.
Understanding the files has become a group activity, happening on all forms of social media. At the core of it lies the knowledge that we don’t know, and that these documents may or may not include ‘useful’ information. There is present a knowing that the chest is empty, but a wish for there to be a treasure. If there was a treasure, it has been taken by whoever came before you, opened the route to the chest, dug it up, and handed it to you – but we will, collectively, still open it up and pick at it, to see if there is perhaps a hidden compartment that will ultimately lead to the downfall of those in power. Be that cabals of baby-face-eating Democrats, or rings of paedophiliac Republicans – whoever is your World Order, the answer to their demise may lie within.
The Epstein Files is essentially a site that enables collective sense-making or even conspiratorial realism. At the core lies not a search for truth, but a libidinal energy invested in the search for a secret gem. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit coined the term ‘hyperstition’, referring to fictions that render themselves true through their own dissemination. The Files are the perfect breeding ground for hyperstition; people are intrigued to find out what their favourite evil paedophile overlord was up to, but they absolutely love fantasising about what he could have been.
Coming back to Bliss Point, misinformation and dream are the two anchoring parameters of the show, which have been ongoing threads that you’ve explored in past works such as DreamArena. Do you see any correlation between the two?
Both dreams and misinformation function on the same logic: internally they are consistent, externally they are detached from reality. They rely on a hallucinatory processing of fragments, and a mode of wilful ignorance of disjunction, in which the collapse of cause and effect and reasoning does not make one question their environs. Instead of plain lies, misinformation and conspiracy are a collective dream-state where the narrative is more soothing, satisfying, exciting, or at times even logical than the facts.
Close-up of DreamArena (2024) at Prospects 2024, Art Rotterdam, photography by Vex Noir.If you can’t accept the Lynchian (and realistic) experience in which reality doesn’t make sense, Occam’s Razor will often point you in the direction of conspiracy, or even favour it. If something naturally has no straightforward explanation as it is a result of various circumstances, the simplest explanation might instead be “the evil overlord caused this.”
When I first met you, what excited me so much about your work was that I always felt tricked somehow afterwards. The sites of trickery in your work – fictionalised personalities, narratives, media interfaces, are so playful, irreverent, often carrying a great sense of satire. Do you see yourself as a trickster?
Perhaps more as a double agent – I operate as the artist, delivering a work in an exhibition, while secretly serving a different purpose. The mimicked elements are remediated not to enforce them, but to find out where the system breaks. That sounds too serious. It’s not that deep to be honest; I am also just juvenile. I like playing games with people, together, collaboratively, but also a little competitively. I’m always up for playing hide-and-seek.
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Bliss Point, curated by Fiona Ye, runs at Plicnik Space Initiative from 8 May to 27 June, 2026.
Melle Nieling creates installations, websites, and sculptures that appropriate the visual languages of corporate architecture, internet spam, and fringe ideologies. Their work mimics mechanisms of authority to examine how constructed frameworks manipulate behaviour and distort reality.
Nieling has exhibited internationally in Europe and the United States. They are the recipient of the VFF Annual Award 2026, the Mondriaan Fonds stipend for emerging talent in both 2022 and 2023, and the Cultuurfonds Young Talent Award in 2019. Nieling has also been selected for a research and development residency at FACT in Liverpool in autumn 2026.
Fiona Xintong Ye is a London-based art historian and curator, researching the history and aesthetics of time-based media art, in relation to infrastructure, theatricality, and affect.
Previously, she has held positions at Tate Modern, Artangel, YDP, ICA London and the Jacob Lawrence Gallery. She holds a BA in Art History and Communications from the University of Washington and an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
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︎ @mellenieling
mellenieling.com
︎ @plicnikspaceinitiative
plicnik.space/bliss-point
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