Zayd Menk is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working within sculpture and installation. Menk’s practice attempts to dissect technology as a hyperobject, the omnipresent force that defines our era, probing the vast and innumerable tangents that arise from our entanglement with technology. At the core of his work lies inquiry into human agency, infrastructure, intangible data, operations, and the obsessions and purposes of progress.
Using found objects as his primary material, Menk creates systems and structures that confront the paradoxes inherent in our relationships with technology, considering the possibilities and limitations of our agency in a world increasingly dominated by machines. Where modern technology tends to become smaller and more sealed off, Menk's work deliberately regresses; salvaged components are used in ways they were never intended, a rebellion against the atrophying of agency and the gradual erosion of autonomy. This process of modifying found objects is visceral and central to his practice, a sense, as he describes it, of being inhaled or convected into something that wants to exist.
This methodology runs across Menk’s sculptural and installation practice, works that grow and mutate from modest origins, sitting within a broader preoccupation with electronic waste as a material and residue of unfathomable operations. Borges's map parable, On Exactitude in Science, resonates strongly with his practice: progress producing ever-larger maps until future generations find them useless, a meditation on the potential self-defeating nature of accumulation. Ideas of obsolescence, extractivism, and the right to repair run through the work, as do broader fascinations with the electromagnetic spectrum, the invisible infrastructures of frequency and signal that saturate contemporary life yet remain largely imperceptible. Menk is an alumnus of New Contemporaries (2023).