2026

An all-day international programme of screenings, talks and four performances that use humour, spectacle and discomfort to probe the dark undersides of contemporary life's seductive images.

The programme brings together artists Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung, Esben Weile Kjær, Liina Magnea, Selin Davasse and Luca Bonamore, whose works explore the ways contemporary culture shapes the body, identity, desire, belonging and our relations with others.

Through screenings, talks and four performances, CUTE BUT PSYCHO examines what happens when the irresistible, the fun and the cute collide with the disturbing, the political and the violent. The programme starts from the alluring surfaces of popular culture, internet imagery, fashion, nightlife, digital technologies and public spectacle, in order to expose the relations of power, vulnerability and control concealed behind them.

The artists deploy humour, irony, theatricality and striking visual scenes to open up questions that mark contemporary life: how far our desires are truly our own, how identity is formed under the gaze of others, what happens when an individual loses their sense of power and belonging, and how technology alters our bodies, relationships and everyday lives.

Visitors are invited to move through the museum, linger with the works and return to them over the course of the day. CUTE BUT PSYCHO is thus built as a series of artistic situations unfolding across different spaces, media and encounters.

CUTE BUT PSYCHO

The all-day event at MSU is the central point of our 2026 CUTE BUT PSYCHO programme, which kicked of in June at the 26th Media Mediterranea, and continues from 11 September to 13 November through exhibitions, performances, workshops, new productions and international collaborations.

CUTE BUT PSYCHO explores the emotional, superficial, seemingly superfluous intensities of contemporary culture: the cute, the cringe, the zany, the weird – content that circulates endlessly online. Vulnerable aesthetics that render the world adorable, janky, awkward, and hyper-interesting in an I’ll-forget-this-in-two-seconds kind of way. These toxically sweet aesthetic categories that rely upon the schizophrenic infrastructures built on data extraction, coercion and monetization. They uphold platform capitalism that uses affect as currency, extracts data through participation and renders attention a form of labor. Platform aesthetics that function as emotional infrastructures producing attachments, commodified intimacies, and algorithmically mediated identities.

What kind of gestures appear in a system of contradiction? Because to participate is to oscillate between carefree pleasure and compulsive performance, between visibility and self-surveillance; contagiously blurring the boundaries between authentic and fake, attractive and repulsive, organic and artificially generated. In such environments, subjectivity becomes co-authored by users, platforms, and generative systems. From frenzied technological systems, bouncing between spectacle and warfare to a world of online radicalization and real-time memefication, ever-agreeing AI chatbots and data-extracting platforms, anyone can get away with anything as long as they are supercute. Although designed to appear democratic, autonomous and objective, both user- and machine- generated content environments survive due to their likeability.

A pandering machine; a criticism-repellent media-trained companion that always appeals to us, affirming our biases. Cute is never without terror, subordination and gore. Cute is always psycho. Toxically positive or negative, whichever we prefer at the given moment. The bully and the victim, the cute psycho exposes these secrets and appropriates all that is furious, hysterical, rabid. In its tender aggression and excessive flexibility, it demonstrates hierarchy and exploitation. Aestheticized as powerless, it appears as an entrancing, but grating expression of dislike.

Toying with leisure, entertainment, soft provocation and seduction, it is tactical in its benignity. We are interested in how this vulnerability can function both as strategy and trap, how it can operate as social regulation as much as resistance. CUTE BUT PSYCHO aims to produce critical and engaged imaginaries, open new forms of intimacy, and unsettle established understandings of political, economic and technological infrastructures shaping our corporeality, subjectivity and labor.

Participating

Luca Bonamore, Selin Davasse, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Liina Magnea, Esben Weile Kjær

Curators

KUĆĆA (Jurica Mlinarec, Klara Petrović, Luja Šimunović)

Production

KUĆĆA
Public relations

Lucija Prstec Smolčec
Design

Ris Marie Pascoe
Online content

Jelena Vunak
Catering

HANJA Delights

Timetable

13:00 – 15:00
Screening and lecture (Gorgona Theater)
Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, I'm So Janky