Emir Shiro first created an erotic art Instagram account which has been suppressed the same year it was created, in 2015. The collage came on when he made a second account using collage, in response to this previous censorship. It appeared for him as a way to bypass the rules of Instagram and to continue talking about the body. He started Instagram at the end of his degree at the School of Fine Arts in Grenoble. He’s currently doing collages which are showing lascivious postures of the body, but prevents the censorship by putting another image on it which isn’t ambiguous at all but which has the exact same forms of those postures. Emir chose Instagram because it was - according to him - the only platform that could claim to be a 2.0 gallery for artists. For him, Instagram has always been a digital gallery, where he could directly interact and see the immediate reactions of his community as if he saw the expressions on their faces.
Instagram is important for him since it is the only way he found to let so people who can not access his content have the opportunity to see it, no matter where they come from. He believes that his Instagram account could be an artistic work because he’s playing with the laws of the platform in particular on the rules about nudity, and he intends to make his work on Instagram a satire of the guidelines imposed by the platform. What also differentiated him from other artists who made collage at the time, it is also according to him qu'Instagram allowed him to link art and political commitment (collages on Donald Trump or Kim Jong-Un for example). Finally, he’s convinced that by using Instagram for artistic purposes, artists are customizing it in that very first extent: the platform was made to be a social network and not an artistic gallery.
He recognizes that, while being an artist who raises questions about the body and eroticism, Instagram often restricts him. He’s not posting any sexually explicit content but still, Instagram has been restricting the scope of his publications and is often deleting some of them, which often creates an animated debate among his community. For him, that means that this censorship isn’t made by real people but by electronic devices which is problematic because those devices are deleting contents that most of the time respect the rules even if it is very similar to a sexual content. This process has direct consequences for him: he can’t share his work to his community, is often punished from posting for several weeks and thus, isn’t able to use the platform to promote his working activity. He also explained that Instagram also explicitly refused to certify his account (which is paradoxical because artistic accounts with 2.000 followers are often certified), because he was making fun of the platform on medias such as Forbes, Playboy or Vice. This refusal decredibilizes his work because Instagram doesn’t recognize him as an artist even though he has hundreds of thousands of followers.
The square format doesn’t appear as constraining to him. It’s even the other way around: people have learn to adapt to this format and created from this constraint. However, the platform - even though it’s massively used by artists - doesn’t adapt itself to artists, you have to adapt to it and its rules yourself, which can be frustrating. According to him, Instagram as it is use by millions of users has also created a trend in the sense that today the square is the shape that predominates in contemporary art, it has become very popular as if the eye had become accustomed to seeing to considering art as something that should be in a square. This consequence in the long term could be something that would not only limit myself as an artist (all the artworks I’m selling are squared), but art itself on the greater level. Emir also acknowledges that Instagram could be a huge mental pressure for artists as well. Even though he’s benefitting from a big community, he knows some of his friends are finding it very difficult to have a creation to post regularly (and most of the time, everyday). They must force themselves into an artistic process which is really intense and sometimes even botched because they don’t want to lose their followers and continue to be well-placed in Instagram’s algorithm.
What Emir Shiro finds funny about Instagram is the fact that it has become a real portfolio for artists and influencers. He affirmed that brands and professionals were often contacting him through Instagram and way less frequently through the traditionnal email. However, he recognizes that this also happens with Twitter. The main difference from other platforms isn’t really that it enables an unique artistic creation. Posting your art on Facebook or Twitter would have the same effect. What is different is the ways thanks to which one can build a community on this platform, more than on any other he believes. This makes it way more possible for artists to live from their art. One trend is also different on Instagram than on other platforms: people are really used to repost contents onto their profile without asking for artist’s permission. This led him to see his collages being posted onto Emily Ratajkowski’s or John Cena’s Instagram account… without even being credited for his work. This raises legal issues. However, at the moment as Instagram is still very recent, Emir Shiro hasn’t been able to file any claim against those practices, that impedes him from growing his community.