Born in Abu Dhabi in 1983 from a French mother and an Algerian father, BENKA is lucky to have the opportunity to see the world through his family travels from his childhood onwards. All these experiences serve to enrich his imagination and his wish to bring about noise through colours. After an average high-school curriculum at the (French Lycée) in Vienna (Austria), BENKA took to music. He joined different metal bands as a drummer, and even starred in 2 albums of the French metal group XTRUNK and in a multitude of concerts throughout Europe.

BENKA pursued his music career while studying for his clinical psychology degree with a focus on smartphone addictions. This is the subject of his thesis and inspires him to create paintings representing aspects of the AIs and the smartphone addiction problem in our society.

BENKA opposes mankind´s dangerous game of underestimating the consequences of AIs such as the humanoid Sophia (first robot to obtain a nationality), Yumi (first robotic orchestra leader) or even Erica (the robotic newscaster on Japanese television). The different captchas present in the works as well as some of the artworks´ names, are a way for this artistic John Connor to symbolize a resistance against the robotisation of our world.

BENKA is a self-taught painter who lives and works in Munich.

BENKA and Captchas

Captchas serve as a security query and consist of randomly arranged numbers or letters. With captchas you can check if a human or a machine is involved. They are human-readable, but almost unreadable for algorithms, as letters and numbers are so distorted that they cannot identify them. These captchas are interpreted by BENKA and transformed into a symbol of his artistic struggle.