Haser /
Cosmic Surgery

De Soto Gallery presented Cosmic Surgery, a photographic series by Alma Haser, as her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show featured three components: 2D portraits, 3D portraits, and freestanding paper sculptures, including new pieces created exclusively for the occasion.

Cosmic Surgery envisioned a near-future where medical procedures enable aesthetic enhancement, mood alteration, and evasion of surveillance. Blending photography with collage and origami, Haser crafted surreal portraits that examined the link between identity and image in an era of visual saturation. Her work imagined a transhumanist future where the boundaries of selfhood are flexible and ever-changing.

This concept was further explored in the second edition of the Cosmic Surgery monograph, which included pop-up constructions and a fictional patient brochure written by science journalist Piers Bizony, detailing the imagined benefits of this radical technology.

Haser's portraits evoke the look of hand-painted photographs with muted palettes and classical poses, lending them a timeless, archival quality—like relics from an imagined future. The 3D portraits carried a sci-fi aesthetic, reminiscent of "brains in jars," preserved as elegant specimens. Her origami sculptures, fragmented and delicate, suggest remnants of former beings, extracted and displayed as artifacts.

Alma Haser (b. 1990, Black Forest, Germany) received a BA (Hons) in Photography in Art Practice from Nottingham Trent University. She won the Magenta Foundation’s Bright Spark Award for Cosmic Surgery and was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery for her earlier series, The Ventriloquist. Haser has exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery in London and UNSEEN in Amsterdam.