TROPEZ
TROPEZ
0

Malin Kuht
DATA LAKES بحيرة البيانات 

2026

4 flags, 4 window films, 1 Raspberry Pi
Dimensions variable

 

For her installation DATA LAKES بحيرة البيانات, Malin Kuht manipulates the geolocation around TROPEZ. Anyone who takes out their phone at the kiosk suddenly finds themselves two hours in the future and somewhere completely different: according to Google Maps, in Hameen Worker City in Abu Dhabi, a city that accommodates up to 30,000 migrant workers.

 

Directly next to Hameen Worker City, Stargate UAE is being built: a data center by OpenAI, Oracle, and G42. Google omits the construction site from its maps, as if it were a military location. It only became known when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaked drone footage of the site in April 2026 — as a threat in the event of a US attack on Iranian power plants. A video that can be accessed via WiFi, images on the kiosk façade, and flags in front of TROPEZ show where the pool guests have been located to: coordinates, a satellite image, a photograph from inside a dormitory, footage of trucks in front of the construction site. The workers living there leave digital traces on Google: reviews, photos, and comments make visible what is actually meant to remain hidden. With DATA LAKES بحيرة البيانات, Kuht reveals the dark side of the “cloud”: the concrete places, people, and working conditions on which AI actually runs, and which remain invisible in our everyday lives.

 

About the artist

Malin Kuht (she/her), born in 1994, lives and works in Berlin (DE). The video artist works at the intersection of digital culture, archival practice, and queer-feminist technologies. In her video works, she investigates how digital spaces shape perception, subjectivity, and concepts of time. Works by Kuht have been shown, among other places, at Dock 20 (Lustenau, AT) and at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Hamburg, DE). In 2023, she was awarded the Kasseler Kunstpreis for visual arts. In 2025, she received a fellowship from Künstlerinnenprojekt Goldrausch (Berlin, DE).

 

 

Malin Kuht refers to the digital artwork Data Pools (2017) by Adam Harvey and Anastasia Kubrak, who used so-called WiFi geo-spoofing to transport bathers to the secret private pools of tech billionaires. With DATA LAKES بحيرة البيانات, Kuht examines whether this hack still works today.