Across the white rooms of Gallery Novo in Pula, the curatorial collective KUĆĆA gathers Andrej Beštak, Anja Leko, Brad Nath, Markéta Slaná, and Tea Stražičić under a phrase that reads like a comment thread and operates like a thesis: cute, but psycho.

A grey body lies beached on the floor. Half woman, half dolphin, its skin a glossy resin sheen, wet brown hair clinging to a snout that is also a face. It does not flop in the sea but on a printed backdrop of polished marble, an aquarium with no water, a screen with no scroll. The creature is stranded inside the gallery the way an account is stranded inside a feed: visible, performing, going nowhere. Nearby, two framed photographs catch the same hybrid mid-crawl, dragging itself forward on human arms, a fin where the legs should be. Obsolescence, here, has a body.

This is the register CUTE BUT PSYCHO works in. Not satire, but diagnosis. The show, organised as the 28th edition of the Media Mediterranea festival run by the Metamedia Association, treats the softest aesthetic categories of the internet as load-bearing architecture. Cute, cringe, zany, weird: the press text names them as “toxically sweet aesthetic categories that rely upon the schizophrenic infrastructures built on data extraction, coercion and monetization.” Adorability is not innocent. It is the surface finish on a machine.

You feel the machinery in the objects. A tall steel hoop stands upright on the polished floor, set with blown-glass spheres that mirror the room like soap bubbles caught before bursting. At its base, a chrome teddy bear; at its crown, a transparent heart-shaped padlock with a keyhole at its centre. Charm and lock, gift and restraint, fused on an industrial armature. The vocabulary is Sanrio, the engineering is hardware. Sweetness rendered as infrastructure, the keepsake refitted as a turnstile.

Elsewhere a low radial frame splays across the floor like a chrome spider, each polished spoke ending in a black faux-fur sleeve, soft cuffs clamped onto cold steel, cables trailing to a small screen. A wall label calls it a docking station. It is tender and predatory at once, a grooming apparatus that could also be a trap, fur that invites the hand and metal that holds the fur. A few steps away, a small black plush dog in a rhinestone harness presses its face into the corner of a plinth, sulking, refusing the room. The bratty creature the curators describe, “the bully and the victim” collapsed into one body, aestheticized as powerless precisely so its dislike can register as charm.

The thesis sharpens against art history's whitest material. A cluster of porcelain-glazed ceramic blocks sits on the floor, their faces embossed in low relief with classical fragments: a Hellenic profile, a cupped hand, a single staring eye, a swimming horse. One block opens into a basin of turquoise resin where toy dolphins leap, frozen mid-arc, a souvenir aquarium pressed into the canon. History-making, the curators write, gets subverted from inside its own iconography, the museum's authority reissued as a child's keepsake. On a column nearby, a cast white winged shoe juts from a chrome bracket, Hermes the messenger god collapsed into the swoosh of a sneaker. The deity of commerce and the logo of commerce, the same wing.

What holds it together is the screens. On a monitor in the corner, a group in synthetic wigs and fur hats clusters on a sofa around a singing bowl, a subtitle naming their “chakra-freak guru Orion Sage Ohana.” In another, the same cast lounges by a night-lit pool, the caption murmuring about “your solar plexus chakra if you will.” Wellness as content, devotion as costume, the sacred outsourced to a feed that will forget it in two seconds. Liturgy without belief, ritual without transcendence, the influencer as a priest of an attention economy that monetises the soul by the impression.

This is the trap the curators want to keep open rather than close. Vulnerability, they argue, “can function both as strategy and trap, how it can operate as social regulation as much as resistance.” The cute psycho is not a victim to be saved or a villain to be exposed. It is the form affect takes when affect becomes labor, performing powerlessness as a tactic, weaponising softness, turning the entrancing into the grating. Tender in its aggression, excessive in its flexibility, it exposes hierarchy by inhabiting it completely.

So the show withholds the comfort of critique-from-above. Nothing here points down at platform capitalism from a safe distance. The dolphin-woman, the locked heart, the furred spider, the sulking dog, the toy aquarium, the winged sneaker, the wellness guru: each one is already inside the system it diagnoses, fluent in its sweetness, complicit in its charm. That is the unsettling part. Not that the cute is secretly psycho, but that the psycho was always cute, and that you were already smiling.