NAXS Studio & Meuko! Meuko!

With a focus on media art from Taiwan, the HYBRID Biennale 2026 presents the Taipei-based creative lab and network NAXS Studio – which has been developing immersive theater, audiovisual performances, and XR and interactive installations since 2015 – and the live artist and music producer Meuko! Meuko! with her latest album. Both projects open up new spaces for possibility and encounter while simultaneously revealing the ambivalence of technological proximity: they create forms of connection and encounter, while urging us to critically examine the new forms of isolation, distance, and alienation that can arise from digital technologies.

Originally conceived as an acclaimed VR experience – presented at the Venice Film Festival and SXSW, and honored at the New Images Festival – “Dark Rooms” by NAXS Studio is being adapted into a film for a presentation at HELLERAU. This presentation brings the audience closer to two of the work’s most intimate chapters and transforms what was once a solitary, immersive encounter into a communal experience: a room full of strangers sitting together in the dark. Immerse yourself in the most intimate moments in the lives of strangers. “Dark Rooms” places you right in the midst of real people’s confessions about longings, traumas, and transformation – first-person stories that normally remain hidden and are now being staged for the first time as a shared cinematic experience.

Meuko! Meuko! presents its new live audiovisual project “ENTER NONE” – created in collaboration with visual artist Cr (Chrom1um) – as a European premiere at HELLERAU. The project enters into a dialogue with the present, past, and future, drawing on the concept of “nothingness” as an infinite field of chaos and transformation. With the help of immersive technologies and performative forms of expression, “ENTER NONE” seeks to channel a transformative energy that forms a contemporary ritual, interweaving the spiritual, the acoustic, and the mechanical. In this context, ENTER NONE represents a process of liberation, rebirth, and transcendence.