2021

Mathilde Arens

Universal Soggy Sheet
All over the world, shower curtains are clinging to legs, arms, knees.
This rude gesture calls for a re-evaluation of the relations between the stationary and the dynamic, the animate and the inanimate.
What’s inside a shower curtain?
Do shower curtains have souls?
Does the shower curtain cling to us or do we cling to it – or both? Can it be mine? Will it ever dissolve?
A new shower curtain came to be, made up of countless tiny beads. It consists of both glass and 3D-printed bio-plastic beads woven together by hand, one by one. Approaching the curtain, the visitor sets a process in motion. As they near it, a water flow is activated, resulting in the shower curtain itself taking a shower. As the bio-plastic beads start to dissolve, gaps appear and colored thread starts to show. In the course of its decay – as it is touched by the visitors’ attention – the curtain’s liveliness surfaces.

Augustina Banyte

We Are Societies Made of Societies

The lively and „smelly“ installation focuses on the symbiotic relationship between human and nonhuman where the main narrator is a pond that evokes an ecological history from which all primordial organisms may have come. Blurring the line between human and nature the pond encourages us to re imagine our relationships and potential change in the era of human exceptionalism.
Credits for scent design: Liza Witte

Chella Giphart

Comfortably Alienated

Chella Giphart has been busy with the experience of alienation from one’s self, in which one cannot grab or recognize the self. It’s a feeling of losing control that is accompanied by overwhelming unease and leaves one unable to consciously limit impulses and behaviors. She asks herself, “What lies beyond our strength, and what do we have no control over?”
In her practice, she tries to seek out the causes of self-alienation and to discover how can one work with it. She processes her alienation into an imaginative image that she tries to express in a playful and humorous yet also uncanny way.
”For me, estrangement from the body is essential for continuing the processes of dismantling and researching.
I’m developing tools that allow me to create translations of my own alienation, translations that may turn out to be forms of psychological observation – to paint a better image, something helpful, enchanting, and cheerful, allowing me to embrace it more.”

Minhwa Kang

Eva Mahhov

1026722

The work consists of a sensor-activated hand sanitizer stand, a legal disclaimer, a camera, and a screen. The chain reaction goes as follows:

hand movement

sensor

disinfectant

camera screen

The outcome is largely at the mercy of the visitors themselves, but they are also at the mercy of the work. It is a comment on this day and age, but also a protest, a game, a theme park – you choose.

Virág Szálas-Motesiczky

The Hungarian Girl is Dreaming about the Arrival of the Hungarian Euro

Consider a hypothetical technique of “animal dissection”(a), which offers new perspectives of surface phenomena with the help of asymmetrically pierced holes. These allow the interior to be touched or even for the animal to be turned inside out. This thought experiment metaphorically demonstrates that the hole which becomes a tunnel through flesh and bone offers an alternative observation and the possibility of impartial discourse.

Think of the tunnel growing inside the animal. How would you describe it? Would you say that the tunnel and the animal have parts in common? Would you say that the tunnel stops growing while the animal runs? Would you say if the animal is wrapped around the hole, it becomes a texture?

In order to be able to truly understand the animal we have to rethink the presence of the tunnels, and to refrain from using them as spy holes to satisfy our “linear curiosity”(b).

(a)
Animal Dissection –
Speculative anatomy of hierarchical models
through socio-political dilemmas
embedded in national attributes and representations.

(b)
Linear Curiosity –
The direction of solid political will
and the collection of its conservative sources;
these sources build on top of each other to maintain
the aesthetic structure of the inherited traditional knowledge models.
Structural changes are almost impossible,
as inner degradation must be avoided at any cost.

Diane Reynier

Another body, please?

Are you looking for something?
Your eyes are so close that they can penetrate me through the pores of my skin. You get up close and too personal. It stings, it hurts a bit. Can you see inside me? Can you feel what I feel, think what I think, sense what I sense?
If we stick our noses together, will we only smell each other? If we fasten our lips together, will we inflate each other until we can fly? If we put our ears together, will we hear the music of our shell-bodies?