.svg)
Menu
Menu
Nina Roehrs, curator of the digital art sector at Paris Photo 2024, explores how digital art thrives in the attention economy—a world where constant streams of content compete for engagement. By addressing societal issues and leveraging technology, digital art invites interaction and creates new opportunities for connection. Learn how this art can be exhibited and experienced in innovative ways today.
How do you bring digital art to people who have never looked for it? Nina Roehrs has spent a decade answering that question - and her answers have consistently involved doing things no one had done before: a VR gallery, a lockdown fitness app with embedded art, a bicycle courier delivering exhibitions to people's homes. Her Zurich gallery has made the exhibition format itself the subject of ongoing experiment.
Nina Roehrs spent 14 years at Swiss Bank UBS, where she completed a PhD on the digitalization of the financial sector. She left in 2014 and followed a path from vintage furniture to contemporary designers to gallery founder - launching a Zurich gallery focused on "art in the digital age" in 2016. She has since curated the digital sector at Paris Photo 2024 (Grand Palais, 15 exhibitors, bringing artists including Lorna Mills and Susamina Ratte to the world's leading photography fair), co-founded WAC Lab (Web3 for Arts and Cultures), and developed Common Garden - a platform for digital exhibitions generating 59% less carbon than conventional alternatives.
The conventional gallery model was designed for painting and sculpture. Nina Roehrs didn't adapt it for digital art - she rebuilt it. FitArt turned lockdown fitness routines into occasions for art encounter. Gallery Delivery sent exhibitions by bicycle to collectors who couldn't come in. The VR gallery with Banz & Bowinkel made the exhibition space itself a work. Each of these projects asks the same question: what does exhibition mean when you're not constrained by the assumption that art lives on walls in rooms? This conversation explores how that sensibility developed and where it's taking her next.
Exhibition format as creative medium
For Roehrs, the format of the exhibition is not neutral - it makes claims about who art is for and how it should be encountered. Redesigning the format is a curatorial act with real stakes.
Paris Photo and institutional bridge-building
Curating the digital sector at Paris Photo 2024 was an opportunity to bring digital art - including Lorna Mills's "underbelly of the internet" aesthetic and Susamina Ratte's screen-based work - into one of the world's most conservative and prestigious photography contexts. The friction was productive.
Common Garden and low-carbon exhibition
The carbon footprint of digital exhibitions is rarely discussed - but it's real. Common Garden's 59% reduction in emissions compared to conventional alternatives is an argument that the way we present digital art matters environmentally, not just aesthetically.
WAC Lab and Web3 for arts and culture
The WAC Lab project brings serious thinking about Web3 tools to arts and cultural organisations that have been slow to engage. Roehrs's position inside that project reflects her conviction that digital art needs better institutional infrastructure, not just better platforms.
"Digital art is much better equipped than physical art, let's say than a painting, to reach the masses, to also invite people to interact and engage and somehow it's a digital... is the media of today, so art that also connects with these technologies, somehow that's also the art of today."
Digital art collecting doesn't happen in a vacuum - it happens in an ecosystem of galleries, institutions, platforms, and events that shape what you can access and how. Nina Roehrs is building some of the most innovative infrastructure in that ecosystem. Understanding what she's doing - and why the exhibition format matters - gives you a more complete map of the field you're navigating.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
