Doppelgangers 2026 – 21 x 29cm, oil pastel, pencil on paper
The Doppelganger myth has taken a profound 21st-century turn. The rise of AI as a political weapon of misinformation is gaining ground. Yanis Varoufakis recently disclosed to social media that an AI video of himself was being circulated, at first glance he took it to be him, until he noticed that the sweater the AI persona was wearing had never been out of one of his apartments, proving the video was fake.
This drawing is based on a YouTube podcast that features Naomi Klein, Yanis Varoufakis, and Mehran Kalili.
Klein recently wrote a book titled Doppelganger, exploring how she is often confused with right-wing American author Naomi Wolf. Varoufakis and Mehran Khalili are portrayed to the right of Klein. Each figure has a double, drawn in oil pastels just below the pencilled heads, ghosts or AI-generated approximations.
Each individual is further contained within vertical separation lines in pencil that carry oil pastel marks. These lines both contain the figures, keeping identities separate, distinct, and fail to do so, the pastels bleeding across boundaries, suggesting how easily identity gets confused, conflated, weaponized. The lines read as interface elements, the grid that’s supposed to organize information but can’t prevent misinformation from spreading.
The myth has taken a profound 21st-century turn, no longer supernatural but algorithmic, no longer rare but industrialized. The extraction economy now includes identity theft at scale.