Olia Lialina maps her networks as web preservation takes centre stage

Olia Lialina, a pioneer of net art — art made to be viewed in a web browser — discusses how to keep that kind of work alive in a feature published by ARTnews on 14 September 2026.

The piece centres on preservation. That is the practical work of keeping early websites, links and files viewable as browsers update, companies close and file formats fall out of use.

The feature has landed while Lialina's solo exhibition, Network Portraits, is on view at Panke Gallery. The show runs from 10 September to 3 October 2026, according to the gallery's listing.

Network Portraits traces networks that reflect the contexts in which the artist and her works exist at a specific moment in time, the gallery says. In other words, the starting point is not a single object on a wall. It is the web of people, platforms and places around the artist at a given point.

The gallery listed a Network Portraits event for Thursday, 10 September at 19:00. A second public session follows later in the run, with Panke Gallery to host a Dead Link Club special session on the occasion of the exhibition on 29 September 2026 from 19:00 to 22:00, according to its events listing.

For anyone picking up this story with no background in net art, the terms are simple. Net art emerged in the 1990s alongside the public web, often using the browser window itself as the venue. Preservation, in this context, means active maintenance. It can involve saving code, migrating files, documenting how a work should look and behave, and deciding what to do when an original link no longer resolves.

What makes this stand out is how ordinary the threat sounds. A painting can fade. A website can simply stop loading. A dead link — a web address that leads nowhere — is familiar to anyone who has clicked an old bookmark. For early web-based work, that everyday breakage is the conservation problem.

Lialina has worked in this area since the early web era, when artists built personal pages, experiments and stories directly in HTML. Keeping those projects accessible now requires both technical fixes and choices about history. Which version counts. What change is acceptable. Who keeps the record.

Network Portraits remains on view until 3 October. The late-September Dead Link Club session is listed as an evening event tied to the exhibition, running for three hours from 19:00.