Over the course of several months in 2014, a woman named Amalia Ulman amassed more than 50,000 Instagram followers. In and of itself, this was not exceptional. She was young and conventionally attractive; her posts featured images signifying a normal, if slightly enviable, life: kittens swaddled in blankets, matching striped pajama sets, rain-dappled rose petals, elegant latte art, and post-shower selfies. But this wasn't the real Amalia Ulman, and not in the way Instagram's inherent curation makes it a not real thing — this was performance art. In a piece she called Excellences & Perfections, Ulman, born in Argentina, was playing a role: that of a young woman who moves to Los Angeles from a small town, trying to make it big.

This year, several of Ulman's Instagram photos from that performance piece will be shown at two art venues in London: the Whitechapel Gallery, where they'll be part of the exhibition Electronic Superhighway (2016 -1966) and the Tate Modern, where they'll be featured in the museum's upcoming exhibition, Performing for the Camera.

Ulman's is not the first Instagram account to find its way into the art world offline. The same year Ulman began her project, the artist Richard Prince began showing other people's Instagram photos at a show at New York's esteemed Gagosian Gallery. Some sold for more than $100,000. Prince drew the ire of some, who said the prints were really just stolen artwork, rather than artistic interpretations.

It's not clear if Ulman actually ever intended to trick anyone into thinking the performance was real. Before she began Excellences & Perfections, she posted a title card to Instagram that said "Part 1" with the caption "Excellences & Perfections," which could have been a giveaway. Still, because Instagram is designed to encourage users to view photos in their feed rather than dig through individual profiles, any follower who missed this image or began following Ulman after it was posted, would likely never have seen it.

Though the line between performing and mocking runs through some questionable territory here (one wonders if Ulman could find a similarly reductive aesthetic to frame her own tastes), it does fall within a relatively recent lineage of personas constructed entirely online. Twitter's Karl Welzein (@DadBoner), a guy from Michigan who loves America, beer, and his friend Dave, is a character created by comedian Mike Burns. Kid Mero, the writer behind the now-defunct blog Victory Light, wrote in a breakneck, unedited voice, insulting rappers and cracking jokes. By day, he was a public school aide. But using Instagram as a performance art medium adds another level of complexity that Twitter and Blogspot lack. With Excellences & Perfections, Ulman's own face became the face of the people she was pretending to be.

Electronic Superhighway (2016 -1966) runs from January 29th to May 15th, 2016.

Performing for the Camera runs from February 18th to June 12th, 2016.