What once would have sounded like fantastical and futuristic inventions from The Fifth Element – silicone-skinned avatars, AI-generated influencers, virtual make-up masks – are now a routine part of our everyday existence. Technology has reached beyond the digital realm to have a very real impact on our physical bodies. More and more, we are using it to alter, enhance and filter our identities. Now, a new exhibition is exploring how beauty and identity have been redefined in and by the digital space; and who holds the power.

Opening at Somerset House as part of its 25th birthday season, Virtual Beauty is an exhibition that takes the glossy aesthetics of the online world and brings them off-screen, IRL. Curated by Bunny Kinney, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado and Mathilde Friis, it brings together over 20 international artists – including Ines Alpha, ORLAN and Qualeasha Wood – working across sculpture, photography, video, and interactive installations. From hyperreal CGI bodies to virtual-reality hair salons, the works question how beauty ideals are created and distributed in the post-internet age – and what it means to exist in a world where your self-image might be more editable than your real one.

“The online self is a hyper-constructed self, over which we have the power to edit, remix and recontextualise,” Kinney told Dazed last year, when a previous iteration of the exhibition showed at Art Basel. “Does this make us more self-aware – or more self-absorbed? Are we less authentic, because we think about the way we look, not simply as it presents itself in a mirror or abstractly in our minds, but in a highly curated way as it presents itself online in digital perpetuity?”

This questioning, and attempts to answer it, sit at the centre of the exhibition, explored through work by names like Lil Miquela – the CGI influencer and internet it-girl – and Sin Wai Kin, who uses drag-infused storytelling to reshape perceptions of identity. Elsewhere, Filip Ćustić presents a silicone sculpture embedded with LED screens, inviting viewers to literally rearrange a raceless, genderless digital body.

“The artists featured in the show take different approaches to the topic, creating work that challenges, criticises and even celebrates beauty ideals as digital technologies transform the way we look and the fundamental way in which we think about the notion of beauty itself,” say Kinney, Herrero Delicado and Friis. “The results can be sexy, silly, and even scary – but always astounding.”

Other artwork include: ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1993) video of live-streamed facial surgery, which is broadcast from the operating table and represents a direct critique of Western beauty standards; and Frederik Heyman’s Virtual Embalming which embodies a digital shrine made from 3D scans of cultural icons like Michèle Lamy and Isabelle Huppert.

Visitors can also explore a full public programme of talks, relaxed sessions, and tours with the curators themselves.

Virtual Beauty runs at Somerset House, London, from 23 July – 28 September 2025.