Anastasiya Dzhioeva didn’t arrive at POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2025 with a “digital corner.” Coming from CIFRA, a multipurpose digital art platform that combines streaming, a marketplace, and educational programming, she arrived with a proposition: that digital art can sit inside the logic of a major international fair without being reduced to spectacle, novelty, or a polite side-programme. POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair 2025 took place on 11–14 September 2025 at Tempelhof Airport (Hangar 7), and is an international contemporary and modern art fair within Berlin Art Week where galleries present curated booths and special presentations. She arrived with a proposition: that digital art can sit inside the logic of a major international fair without being reduced to spectacle, novelty, or a polite side-programme. The CIFRA × Upframe digital section was not simply present; it was legible — and in a fair environment, legibility is power. It is the difference between a visitor glancing and moving on, and a visitor stopping long enough to be changed by what they’re seeing.
It also mattered, structurally, that CIFRA was the only dedicated digital media section at POSITIONS that year. Being the only one is a kind of pressure you can’t fake. It forces the section to carry the medium’s reputation on its back: if the presentation is sloppy, digital art becomes “sloppy”; if it reads like entertainment, digital art becomes “entertainment.” Anastasiya’s work — both before the fair behind the screen and on-site during the fair — was precisely about refusing those defaults, and building a framework where emerging artists could be perceived through the fair’s most serious lens: as contemporary practice that can hold attention under pressure, take up space among objects, and claim its place in an ecosystem that still privileges the physical.
The thematic anchor, Future Recipes, was the right kind of idea for that task because it isn’t decorative. A recipe is a method: a set of ingredients, constraints, tools, and infrastructures that decide what becomes possible. In digital culture, “recipes” are everywhere — the algorithmic recipes that govern visibility, the technical recipes that dictate what formats can circulate, the social recipes that decide what becomes credible. By placing Future Recipes in the fair context, Anastasiya and the CIFRA team were effectively saying: the future of digital practice isn’t a single aesthetic; it’s the evolving relationship between artists and the systems that shape their work’s production and reception.
That is why the open call process is not just an administrative detail. It is part of the argument. Future Recipes attracted 166 submissions, each requiring full registration and upload — a procedural seriousness that signals to artists and audiences alike that this isn’t a pop-up gimmick. Anastasiya Dzhioeva’s coordination of that pipeline matters because digital art is often trapped between two extremes: the frictionless online feed, where work is endlessly accessible but rarely deeply engaged, and the specialist festival circuit, where the audience arrives pre-converted. A fair is neither. A fair is where work has to convince strangers, quickly, in public, in transit.
Within that structure, the selection’s breadth became a strength because it was choreographed rather than dumped. You could feel it in how the works sat together: not as a random stack of moving images, but as a conversation about bodies, systems, ritual, simulation, appetite, and belief. One minute you might find yourself pulled into Annan Shao’s Reptile Cafe, with its unsettling intimacy and world-building; the next you’re in the conceptual temperature shift of Alexandra Tchebotiko’s Tomorrow I won’t be here, which carries disappearance not as drama but as logic. Zack Nguyen’s The Space Between Becomes Us doesn’t merely “show” something — it asks what distance does to identity, how relational gaps become material. Then the room can tilt again: S()fia Braga’s Third Impact moves with a kind of charged, speculative intensity, while Eyez Li’s Wandering at the Exit of Deity / 徘徊于神明的出口 touches the spiritual and the infrastructural at once, holding the sacred and the system in the same frame.
If the theme is “recipes,” then these works read like different forms of cooking: slow fermentation versus flash heat, careful measurement versus intuitive improvisation. That metaphor becomes especially vivid when the fair context forces viewers to ask a question they don’t always ask online: not only “what do I feel,” but “what is this doing here, among objects, among markets, among institutions?” Anastasiya Dzhioeva’s curatorial translation was partly about letting that question remain open without letting it become dismissive.
This is also why the UK presence inside the selection carried a specific kind of resonance. A fair is a career-making context precisely because it is a place where an artist’s work is not simply “watched” but positioned. When mmii’s Co:beliefs sits in a fair environment, it isn’t just a piece of digital media — it becomes a statement about how contemporary belief systems are engineered, shared, and performed. When James Bloom’s Half Cheetah appears nearby, it’s not simply a striking work title; it becomes a hinge between the language of technology and the language of body, speed, and evolution — the kind of tension fairs understand well because they’re built on the friction between old forms and new propositions.
Then you have the UK-connected practices that complicate the idea of national scenes entirely: Ruini Shi (China/UK), with FuneralPlay, brings ritual into the digital with a sharpness that resists both sentimentality and irony; Maricel Reinhard (US/UK), with A Meal For The Rest of Your Life, turns appetite into a system of meaning — not “food” as lifestyle, but consumption as a structural condition. In a fair context, these works don’t just “represent” UK-linked practice; they demonstrate that emerging digital artists can be read seriously by the same audiences who typically reserve that seriousness for painting, sculpture, and object-based installation.
The curatorial picks layered the argument further, refusing to let “emerging” become an aesthetic category. Under Alessandro Ludovico’s selection, SENAIDA’s Thread 342: East of Empire (3-Channel) introduces multi-channel complexity — not as tech flex, but as a way of thinking about history, empire, and split perception. Frederik De Wilde’s ADAL brings a different pressure: a sense of systems and signal that feels clean until you notice how much it’s doing. Katia Sophia Ditzler’s WE ARE DESCENDED FROM THE SAME EUKARYOTE pushes the theme toward the biological and the philosophical, reminding the fair audience that “future” is not only computational; it’s cellular, shared, and unsettlingly continuous.
And Anika Meier’s picks sharpened the emotional register without abandoning rigor. Ivona Tau’s Summer Diary holds intimacy in a way that feels fragile in a fair’s bright, transactional atmosphere — which is precisely why it matters to place it there. Marine Bléhaut’s Clara navigates presence and character with a clarity that doesn’t need volume to hold you. These choices complicated the section’s rhythm: they made room for quiet works to survive the fair.
None of this cohesion happens by accident, and this is the part that people often miss when they talk about “visibility.” Anastasiya Dzhioeva’s labour was both long-term and immediate. Before the fair, her work happened “behind the screen”: shaping the open call, coordinating jury workflow, managing communication with artists, ensuring registrations and uploads were complete, and translating a curatorial idea into a selection that could be installed and understood. That behind-the-scenes work is the invisible ingredient in the recipe — the thing that makes the fair moment possible.
Then, during the fair, Anastasiya was physically present on site — and that matters just as much. A digital section becomes a true public-facing space only when someone holds it: answering questions, contextualising without flattening, supporting artists, speaking to collectors and institutional representatives who want to understand how digital work sits inside acquisition logic, and ensuring the zone doesn’t slip into the “cool screens” trap. In the highest-traffic parts of a fair, attention is a constant negotiation. Anastasiya’s on-site presence helped turn passing curiosity into engaged looking.
The metrics tell part of the story: the section was positioned in one of the most frequented areas of the pavilion, reaching an estimated 400 visitors in the pop-up zone within a total attendance often cited around 30,000. The project generated 14 documented media and institutional mentions, plus organic social engagement that extended beyond the fair itself. But the deeper point is conceptual: CIFRA’s presence as the only digital art section didn’t just serve CIFRA — it served the artists by placing their work in a context where it could be taken seriously, evaluated, remembered, and advocated for.
A fair perspective is harsh — but it is also clarifying. It forces digital art to be framed as art, not content. It forces audiences to slow down long enough to understand method, not merely effect. It forces institutions and collectors to confront the reality that digital practices are not an emerging side-genre; they are contemporary practice, fully. At POSITIONS 2025, Anastasiya Dzhioeva helped make that confrontation possible — with a theme that operated as a method, with a selection that held together without flattening difference, and with the kind of on-site stewardship that turns an idea into a space people actually enter.
