The Sims meets the digital apocalypse in Nicoleta Mureş’ 3D collages

Many children of the 90s and 2000s will remember causing some havoc on The Sims. Putting your Sim in the swimming pool and taking away the ladder; setting off a fire and taking away all the doors; or making a house entirely devoid of toilets are just a few examples. But, Nicoleta Mureş’ pieces – which feature 3D avatars implicated in surreal scenes of catastrophic happenings – are far from mindless childhood cruelty, and instead have an important message woven throughout.

“Fascinated” by the times we currently live in, Nicoleta represents “the virtual body under different stress-related situations, anxieties and fears”. She continues: “my works may appear dystopian because of the 'numbness' of the characters – they seem to have a hard time adapting to such a fast changing environment.” This focus has led Mureş to become nostalgic about the internet of the early 2000s, when “we were less hypnotised by screens”. And so, much of her work – the uniform 3D avatars and found photos – takes inspiration from this more organic, less polished digital era.