Soft Lock

A deserted hotel room shows remnants of its guest: half-drunk beverages stand around the space, a blaring TV mumbles horoscopes, fake lashes are left in the bathroom and a beeping string-phone has been taken off the horn. Navigating the fluid terrain of mythmaking and digital identity, “SOFT LOCK” blends real footage with virtual environments, playing with the logic of in-game spaces, where a soft lock traps the player within a room’s boundaries. At its core, the work interrogates the notion of female identity by questioning the attributes ascribed to the ‘female character’ as a categorical subject. As AI and digital culture continue to shape and redefine gendered constructs, “SOFT LOCK” probes what is lost, distorted, or reconfigured in the process.

Megan Bruinen
Megan Bruinen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how identity is shaped through world-building—how individuals and communities navigate, inhabit, and redefine spaces under both external systems of control and personal or collective expression. Working across video, sound and writing, she examines how imagined worlds take shape through conceptual speculation, gamified structures and the assemblage of media, memory, and language. Her videoworks and installations feature characters and monologues constructed in a Frankenstein-like manner, weaving together gleaned fragments from personal archives, online repositories, overheard conversations and literary sources. These composites blur the boundaries of authorship, mirroring the fluidity of communication and selfconstruction in contemporary urban and digital environments. Megan Bruinen lives and works between Brussels and Paris.