Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary artist interrogating surveillant and bodily imaging technologies.
Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher based in Toronto, Canada. Oppel’s art practice deploys transparent substrates (glass, mirror, the screen), paired with 3D rendered imagery as a framework to consider the paradoxes of legibility under surveillance capitalism. Currently, Oppel is interested in addressing both the complicity with, and refusal of, biometric capture on a bodily scale by misusing operational imaging technologies. Oppel’s doctoral research takes a feminist approach to surveillance studies and examines data extraction technologies as sites of biopolitical control through a research-creation framework. Central to this research is a close examination of technologies which dataify and (re)image the body, including biometric and photogrammetric technologies and 3D scanning and rendering technologies, which increasingly export the content of our collective cultural imaginary.
Oppel has exhibited locally and internationally, with notable exhibitions including Everything Must Go, CAFKA.25 Biennial, Kitchener, ON (2025), Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch, InterAccess, Toronto, ON (2025), on either side of a surface, Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto, ON (2023), Future Voyage: The Time for Adaptation, Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal, QC (2023), and site-specific projects in Tokyo, Japan and Istanbul, Turkey. Oppel is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a Sessional Instructor at OCAD University.
