failed transcendence | group show

Posthuman ecologies (2023) is an installation composed of used everyday items and organic objects, such as bones, wasp nests and corals, which Nicolás Lamas relates to each other in a vitrified industrial refrigerator as a cabinet. This creates hybrid fossils fused from human objects and animals, with plastic as a synthetic material, resembling a new kind of bone, defying time and weather and inscribing itself in the geological history of the planet. Thus the used motorcycle helmet acts as a protective shell for the wasp nest, sneakers in various stages of decay combined with coral, uniting oceanic organisms with human consumer production. At first the various materialities appear to be at odds with one another, but upon closer examination they reveal similarities in form and context. In his works, the artist analyzes and deconstructs the relationship between human and non-human objects and the associated power structures that determine how we perceive, interpret, and interact with our environment. In his works, there is a constant dialogue between opposing forces that produce a hybrid body of work that cannot be defined or oriented in a single direction.

Cathartic Illustration is a series of screen prints by Jeremy Shaw in which he draws from documentary images from newspaper archives in which the subjects depicted are in excessive or altered states of mind. Shaw re-photographs the archival images in analog with an effect lens, distorting the subjects' poses and proportions. Shaw chooses a coherent aesthetic for his manipulation of historical photographs, so that through paper choice and framing, the contemporary alienation is not immediately apparent. He subtly inserts another level of viewing, emphasizing the ecstatic moment of the subjects depicted through distortion and focusing on the fleeting nature of these states of consciousness. The titles of the artworks (Virtuality, L/2) in parentheses are taken from text fragments that can be found on the back of the original archival photographs, but do not provide any information about the context of creation or chronology. The focus is on the ecstatic bodily practices that span broad time horizons of human cultural history and that Shaw highlights. The artist describes his works as parafictional or post-documentary, blurring realities with social imaginaries through his defamiliarizations.

GEN PNL (DYOR U 3) (2023) is a digital collage on aludibond in which Niko Abramidis &NE combines pigment print and spray paint to explore different time horizons. In the series of works, the artist uses image-generating artificial intelligence to create unreal temple architectures inspired by Greek mythology and the Odyssey by the ancient poet Homer. Abramidis &NE combines these motifs with images of stock prices, microchips, and film stills from science fiction movies, and sets them in spherical color worlds that he works on with spray paint and brushes. "For me, these images are also testimonies from the future, when our civilization, like that of the Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the Mayans and the Incas, will eventually have perished. You can't look into the future without looking at the past. In a way, my way of working is a future archeology." In Abramidis &NE's works, different times collide that are not (yet) clearly decipherable - thus the artist distorts comprehensible time horizons and thus refers to our present, which has become impenetrable due to its complexity.

The video and sound installation The Ancients call it Ataraxia by Haroon Mirza and Helga Dóróthea Fannon is a continuation of Mirza's series of works Modular Operas and forms a meditative composition of two video works, three large-scale solar panels with two halogen spotlights and a pair of bongo drums. The videos, some of which appear to be documentary, accompany various characters, including a group of children, as well as Mirza and Fannon themselves during ritual acts, centred around a tea ceremony with Amanita muscaria mushrooms. The artists draw on the rich mythology and folklore surrounding the poisonous fly amanita, which is used in shamanistic practices as a remedy or portal to other universes. The video work shows, among other things, their (apparent) harvesting and preparation, with the camera capturing dreamlike sequences of natural representations and engineered objects, as if guided by vertigo.