Fizz Malas – ‘Lost Property’

05/06/25 till 18/06/25

“My practice explores and plays with the law, particularly intellectual property, censorship and privacy through printmaking, photography, and installation. The multiplied image is also relevant as well as examining labels such as illustration, decorative, and labour.

More broadly, I’m concerned with how well (or not) legal concepts are communicated enabling scrutiny by society at large.

It’s a practice which results in a delicious number of questions and hardly any answers.

For the exhibition at Salon, I am showing work from the last two years, using the physicality and materiality of printmaking (lithography and monotypes) to explore and play with ‘authorship’ in the age of digital ‘ecosystems’ and tech in your hand (as things currently stand). I have also begun to prod the notion of ‘originality’ which is a concept key to copyright law in the 21st century.

Lithography (and printmaking generally) is particularly relevant because of its link to the origins of copyright and the development of ‘authorship’ and ‘originality’ as legal norms. It is also intensely physical. Lithography (printing on stone) is a fairly straightforward process but requires a great deal more technical know-how that it seems.

The main lithographic work featured in this exhibition ‘Be the talent, not the labour’ was printed in Offenbach in Germany, where Alois Senenfelder (who also studied law!) developed lithography in the late 1700s. He set up his second workshop in London. I have a strong bond to this workshop and am delighted to be able to build a link between it and the UK/Margate.

Question relating to the exhibition:

– Who benefits from the rights of the ‘author’ in 2025?
– What role do the owners of online ecosystems play in shaping how intellectual property and related rights evolve?
– What role do digital environments play in shaping how we see human originality and creativity?
– To what extent are we able to critically assess the role these online environments play within society and how this shapes laws and perceptions relating to authorship?
– Does an author’s online activity affect how they pursue their creative practice?
– How effectively is the debate on authorship and originality being communicated without hyperbole?
– To what extent do you see online visual content as something to copy and paste, detached from that of an author?
– Does the proliferation of online visual works dilute the notion of the human author
– Who owns your visual online content?

Final thought:
At present, the US has confirmed that AI cannot hold copyright in a work because to do so you need to be human. China says otherwise. The UK government has just completed a survey on copyright which it says will inform any relevant legislative changes in the area. It has also just finished debating a new bill on ‘Data (use and access)’ which is in the final stages of scrutiny before becoming law and potentially (although it’s unclear on the drafting) enlarged the notion of legitimate interest thus enabling online actors to ‘process data’ without the hurdles required by earlier legislation.

There is clearly a tipping point in how society views itself in relation to its activity in the physical realm versus the online, and one wonders whether Barthes was right to declare ‘The death of the author’.”

Join us at Salon on:

✨ Thursday 5th June 6-9pm – Private View

🦩 Saturday 7th June at 2-6pm – “Mine? Yours? Ours? Theirs? An afternoon of frivolous conversation, drinks, nibbles and light vandalism with the artist”