GDA is pleased to announce and host the first solo exhibition of Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino in São Paulo. Opening on February 7th, from 5pm to 9pm, and on view until March 15th, the show marks the beginning of the gallery’s program in 2025. All the works presented in the exhibition are new and were produced in the space where the presentation takes place, at Rua Barra Funda, 654, São Paulo, Brazil.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (Brazil, 1989) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Their work has been shown in Germany and internationally, including exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany), Kunstverein Kevin Space (Austria), Galerie Molitor (Germany), Kunsthal Nord (Denmark), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), Simian (Denmark), Museu Nacional da República (Brazil), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Germany), Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), and Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil). Amongst institutional collections and commissions are Kadist (France),  Museu Nacional da República (Brazil); the One Minutes Foundation at Sandberg Instituut (Netherlands); Instituto Moreira Salles, (Brazil), and Pampulha Art Museum (Brazil).  Celestino was awarded numerous grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships, including the ars viva prize for visual arts 2025 (Germany), Pampulha Grant (Brazil), Ducato Prize (Italy), Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (Germany), La Becque (Switzerland), PACT Zollverein (Germany), British Council (UK), and Pivô (Brazil). In February 2024, their lecture ‘From Language’ was presented at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, anticipating following presentations at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg, and the Kunsthalle Bremen in January 2025. Among their 2025 exhibitions are solo exhibitions at GDA (São Paulo), Kunstraum Leuphana (Lüneburg), Between Bridges Foundation (Berlin), and Sharp Projects (Copenhagen), as well as group exhibitions at Haus der Kunst (Munich), Palais Populaire (Berlin), and Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm). Also in 2025, Wisrah will participate in the artistic residency at Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria, and in 2026, in the Fogo Island Arts, Canada residency program.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/1-Wisrah-C.-V.-da-R.-Celestino.jpg

“At the beginning of the 17th century, during an evening in Lucerne or London, the splendid story began. A secret and benevolent society (whose members included Dalgarno and later George Berkley) was founded in order to invent a country… After a two-century hiatus, the persecuted fraternity re-emerged in America. Around 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of the members conversed with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. Buckley let him speak with some disdain – and laughed at the modesty of the project -. He told him that in America it is absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet.” – Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941.

 

Two years into the second World War, Borges’ novel The Garden of Forked Paths (1941) reflected his vision of the way in which the old colonial powers were re-drawing their objectives. From Buenos Aires, his words counter the narratives of Western press. Is the victory they speak of the erasure of the great civilisations in the Middle East behind newly drawn colonial borders? Was it the loss of his great friend and poet Federico García Lorca to fascist forces – from whom he had been gifted a great love for the Arab World – and the fall of the Spanish Republic to the Franco regime? Was it the new colonial interests of the United States that had already begun their deeper penetration into the South American continent and that would soon develop into planned military coups and the disappearance of thousands of his countrymen? For Borges, magical realism was not only a literary style, but a way of surviving in a world in which what is written does not appear to fit with reality.

 

This exhibition mirrors the seven chapters of Borges’ famous novel with seven artistic proposals that function as short-stories to a surrealist narrative of our times through imagination and abstraction. Borges’ role as an artist was that of an agent of subversion who used culture to reveal the indisputable machinations of a world in flux, an 80 year cycle with parallels to the cosmogenic shifts of today. This project positions Cairo as the timeless cosmopolitan city that the buildings of Darb al-Ahmar invoke as an escape from the silence and indifference that has taken hold of Europe in reaction to the fight against its strongholds and in an effort to fight against the colonisation of the imagination.

 

The artists in this exhibition present a new speculative reality that is constantly created through our words and faculties. It lies within the non-linearity of time and the idea that modernity is not true progress. It creates a multiplicity of stories that inhabit a reality which is the subsoil of all invented hegemonies. There is an everlasting resistance that survives in the mass and the multitude, in the forgotten silent words of centuries of civilisations that accompany us in the ancient streets, trades, livelihoods, and spirituality of Islamic Cairo. 

 

“In our memories, a fictitious past has already taken the place of another, of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatar… A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our predictions are correct, within a hundred years someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.”

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/1.BaytalSinnary.jpeg

Longtermhandstand is proud to present the duo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Erin M. Riley and Hungarian painter Mónika Kárándi. This showcase highlights the striking contrast between two distinct artistic approaches, not only in their chosen mediums—Riley’s handwoven tapestries and Kárándi’s contemporary painted landscapes—but also in their exploration of the individual versus the collective. Erin M. Riley’s meticulously crafted, large-scale woven works unravel the intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw terrain of personal history, relationships, trauma, and resilience. Using a collage-like process, she weaves together moments from personal archives, internet imagery, and media clippings to construct deeply personal yet universally resonant narratives. Her work lays bare the complexities of the female experience, exposing how trauma etches itself into the psyche and body. Each tapestry acts as a vessel of memory, inviting viewers into a space of vulnerability and self-examination. Mónika Kárándi, in contrast, expands the notion of identity through collective transformation. Her painted landscapes explore the body’s extension beyond its physical boundaries, merging it with the natural world. Inspired by the ancient desert plant Welwitschia Mirabilis—an organism that has endured for millennia—her figures stretch, tangle, and intertwine like tendrils reaching for both sky and earth. These hair-like, morphing forms embody endurance, resilience, and the longing for connection. Kárándi’s work blurs the line between human and plant life, suggesting a profound interdependence between individual existence and the greater forces of nature. As she describes, “Even if I did separate them, they would again and again long to merge with each other.” Through Riley’s deeply introspective, singular narratives and Kárándi’s expansive, interconnected visions, “Deep Inside in the Safest Place” invites us to consider the interplay between isolation and unity, fragmentation and continuity, trauma and survival. In this dynamic juxtaposition, the exhibition offers a meditation on endurance—both personal and collective—and the fluid boundaries that shape our identities over time.

Péter Bencze

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MG_8643_125-scaled.jpg

The Karussell Association APS presents Anime di Cristallo: a research project by artist Silvia Mariotti that will be developed over the course of two years between Italy and Portugal.The project, made possible thanks to the support of the Direzione Generale Creatività contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura (General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture) within the framework of the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024).

 

The exhibition Anime di Cristallo, installed in the former science laboratory of the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência of Lisbon, is inspired by the theories of biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who attributed a form of intelligence even to inorganic matter, and questions the role of humankind in the transformation of nature. Mariotti’s works – including sculptures, installations and photographs – explore hypothetical lifeforms generated by the coupling of natural and artificial elements, evoking suspended and changing worlds.At the heart of the project lies an investigation into the transformations and connections between the natural and the artificial, between human and nonhuman elements. Inspired by Haeckel’s studies, reinterpreted and amplified by the research of Italian scientist Laura Tripaldi, to whom the artist owes much in terms of her first embarking on the present project, Mariotti questions how nature evolves and changes through contamination and hybridization, modifying and adapting to processes of anthropisation. Through a combination of photography and sculpture, the artist simulates hybrid ecosystems, where imaginary creatures – the upshot of the fusion of organic and inorganic elements – are found as contemporary fossils. The works evoke worlds suspended in time, offering a reflection on humankind’s role in interfering with and altering the natural environment and how – even in its inorganic dimension – it is capable of adapting and responding in amazing ways even to the most violent of impact. Anime di Cristallo represents a profound inquiry into the consequences of human activity and the urgency of adopting new perspectives, mindful of the importance of nature as a basis for life and an entity in a constant state of renewal, forever generating changing forms of existence.

 

The advent of the iguanas

Silvia Mariotti amid catastrophe and transformation

Lately, there is a name that has been come up frequently in the tales of Silvia Mariotti, one who has been talking about ‘crystals’ for years. Not just crystals that form spontaneously in nature but also artificial ones. She says they are endowed with a soul, a sora of consciousness or cognitive ability to self-organise. She has read all the studies of scientist Laura Tripaldi on the ‘intelligence of materials,’^[1] which she is fascinated by. Crystals are formed in the wake of a transition of state in matter, i.e. through the process of the gradual solidification of a liquid, and take shape in orderly structures of various sizes. A natural type of crystallisation is visible in mineral rocks as stalactites and stalagmites: particular calcareous formations present in caves subject to karst phenomena.^[2] The formation periods of mineral deposits are extremely long, but seeing these stratified dripping forms (the Greek origin of the names in fact means ‘dripping’, ‘droplet’) is like witnessing the time captured in an image. Just like happens in the photographic process, recurrent in the work of Mariotti. Like photography, crystals create the illusion that time may be halted. When we speak of ‘crystallising’ in the figurative sense, we in fact mean the ability to block the flow of matter in an image. Like a crystal – which means ‘ice’ – time is frozen in a shape. Stabilising this process of the transformation of matter is part of Mariotti’s intention: making visible three-dimensional snapshots, and thereby visualising a possible future time in space. Her landscapes are presented simultaneously as real and virtual, organic and inorganic, human and artificial, past and future, living and non-living. Within them, traces of human presence, organic materials and inorganic compounds are to be found side by side. I am reminded of the descriptions of J. G. Ballard, an author very dear to her, in The Drowned World:^[3] a novel from the ‘catastrophic’ tetralogy by the British writer. Because of the increase in temperatures and the ensuing rise of ocean levels, the Earth changes climate and appearance: buildings are coated in layers of moss, and the grey ribbons of tarmac with the rusting shells of cars had been submerged by water, and now only boundless forests rise skywards. Reptiles “had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.” Who knows whether, should they have the ability to do so in the future, human beings would choose to put a stop to the ‘advent of the iguanas’, or if on the other hand, they would prefer to let themselves be swallowed up by the new world, embracing a shared destiny of transformation, as the protagonist of the book chooses to do?

Giulia Bortoluzzi

 

^[1] Laura Tripaldi, Menti parallele. Scoprire l’intelligenza dei materiali, effequ, 2020.

^[2] Karst territories were the centre of interest in Mariotti’s research as a symbol of collective memory in Dawn on a Dark Sublime (2016).

^[3] James G. Ballard, The Drowned World, Berkley Books, London 1962.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2-7-scaled.jpghttps://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1web-scaled.jpg

In the exhibition Pillar of Societies, the collective Center for Peripheries explores gestures of the appropriation of places by minorities in ethnic enclaves in cities of the global West. Unlike strategies or tactics, which presume a form of organisation, a defined goal and a structured plan, gestures are acts of our daily lives that are charged with moments of resistance. In the Neue Galerie, Center for Peripheries looks at these everyday rituals of resistance, which oppose the vanishing of migrant communities and identities and often coincide with forced integration. The exhibition Pillar of Societies is part of the annual programme The Resistance of Nothingness curated by Bettina Siegele.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Stuetze-der-Gesellschaften-01-scaled.jpeg

This ProtoZone* collects stories of those who are left behind. They are stories of loss and remnants after death, destruction or extinction. Who or what is left behind, and how could these stories be possibly told?

Stories of Those Left Behind resists the notion of a world divided into the realms of the living and the dead, into life as being in the world versus non-life as non-existence. It approaches places of refuge on an unexcited backstage that takes care of what we are left with when left behind.

A person is left behind when a loved one dies. People are left behind when they are socially excluded, discriminated against or even wiped out. More-than-human forms of existence are left behind when their habitats are destroyed, when they become extinct. Each of these experiences leaves traces in the form of memories, objects or stories. Attending to these traces becomes a labor of mourning.

The participating artists show ways of dealing with personal, collective and planetary loss. They suggest how to nurture our relationships with the dead and how to get in touch with our ancestors. Possibly, their memories persist in our bodies, shaping our past and future.

ProtoZone17 suggests a kinship that goes beyond bloodlines and biological origins. How can we build relationships with more-than-human beings? What can we learn from them about care and transience? The works create spaces where transience becomes tangible.

These spaces are both intimate and monumental. They suspend, slow down or stretch time. Because death changes our relationship to time. How does one live in this other, new temporality?

 

*A Protozone gives space to collaboration and to exhibitions, whose openness is still visible. The Protozone can accommodate any form of art, and it gives room for workshops and scholarship, which in turn engage in a process with other elements in the zone.

The Protozones at Shedhalle are designed to be inclusive, and they enable the collaboration of artists and people with different backgrounds. They allow for slow and persistent action, they create a space where processes can unfold. Shedhalle and its Protozones are places for unconventional practices and for experiments. They give a platform to artists who work in different disciplines, and whose complex biographies and identities we want to accommodate. We perceive the Protozone as a starting point for a community of artists and activists who do not conform to the demands of the art market.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/JenSimone2-scaled.jpg

Fábio Colaço is a young Portuguese artist who presents his first solo exhibition at ADN Galeria: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW. The exhibition is a critical reflection on the current socioeconomic state through a series of allegories that mix cultural references. These are also organized in an exhibition route that fictionalizes the symbolic structure of a house.

The result is an exhibition that describes a dystopian reality, an intricate network of associations that reflect different readings of our time and different historical episodes. In Untitled (1984), for example, we find George Orwell’s book 1984 rolled up in the form of a monocle and arranged at the level of our eyes, turning it into an instrument of surveillance. A materialization of the “Big Brother” described in the same book.

Colaço’s works transcend the traditional boundaries of sculpture, his main area of artistic training. He uses alternative materials and devices, adapting each technique to different investigations. A good example of this is Faust (2024), an object piece made of a pair of shoes and a stack of euro cent coins. The absence of the body absorbed by that pile of low-value coins shows that the character alluded in the title has sold his soul in exchange for being left without power, health, or glory.

Thus, the subversive nature of the works and also their irony, creates allegories that facilitate new interpretations by the viewer. In each title there is an analysis of certain social traumas typical of nowadays, where our economic system takes center stage. In this sense, the element that integrates several works as raw material shaped by the artist is especially relevant: money.

As we have seen, in this exhibition apparently familiar and banal images and objects are appropriated, metamorphosed and recontextualised. In Untitled (timeline) (2024) we see a wall clock where numbers are replaced by words that allude to certain ordinary, often unnoticed, moments in our daily routines. A metaphor for how time is used, emphasizing the banality that fills it.

In short, Colaço expresses a rebellion against museologically consecrated forms, challenging the way in which we perceive power. YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW is the opportunity to discover for the first time in Barcelona the pertinent and poignant work of an artist whose pieces are already recognized and that are part of several collections in Portugal.

Text by Paulo Mendes

The exhibition will open on November 30th at 12 pm. at ADN Galeria (C/ de Mallorca, 205, L’Eixample, 08036 Barcelona), and will remain open to the public until January 25th.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/DSC0040-scaled.jpg

Sharif Baruwa’s dense yet precise, playful yet deep and nonchalant yet always carefully arranged environments seem to achieve both. They maintain a certain eeriness and opaqueness while revealing cracks and layers that allow for readings of the artist’s experience and cosmovision as well as the sociopolitical underlying structures that shape them. These readings are not fixed though, and as one moves through space, the singular elements appear to have an iridescence of a conceptual nature, meaning that as the visual connections between them change also their readings may vary.

Effortlessly assembling drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, video and poetry into a fragmentary unity, Sharif’s environments provoke feelings of familiarity as they integrate not only materials but also objects present in everyday life. The techniques, as well as their level of precision differ according to necessity, varying from hyper realistic and detailed moments to less defined representations which at times only demand a few strokes to achieve a certain image or effect. At the same time, painterly and sculptural deliberations such as composition, proportions, combinations of materials or specific colour palettes are never neglected and put into the service of concept and content.

Sharif’s practice speaks from a position of loving resistance to the logics and forces of oppression that have led us to a moment in time where gruesome crimes against humanity are committed overtly and with impunity on the stage of world politics and it has become impossible to ignore the endless trail of broken promises. (Laura Amann)

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/P1_G6A4229-scaled.jpg

Galerie Martin Janda is showing Fables, Hugo Canoilas’s second solo exhibition from 6th December 2024 until 18th January 2025. The show presents a compendium of the artist’s latest works, including large–scale paintings, drawings, and sculptures produced within the last two years.

The etymology of the word fable traces back to Old French, meaning “falsehood, fictitious narrative; a lie, pretense.” The word is derived from the Latin fabula, “story with a lesson, tale,” and from fari, “to speak, tell, say.” The later meaning “animal story” comes from the popularity of the Greek Aesop’s tales, which defined it as a short, comic tale making a moral point about human nature, usually through animal characters behaving in human ways.
Promptly, its meaning shifted from serving the purpose of speaking to others, communicating a shared reality, to storytelling and later on to the creation of fictitious or speculative realities. In other words, a fable is a literary form able to contain in itself both reality and fiction, human and non–human, natural and artificial, physical and immaterial, figurative and abstract.

While writing this text, I learned about an online library called Fable that can generate unique and random passwords. As far back as Ancient Mesopotamia, the Akkadian word for “password” was the same as for “omen.” Not only did the word celebrate the almost mythical difficulty of deciphering, but it also connotes a shared community responsibility.
An omen was a sign from the gods that indicated future events. It was believed to be a message from the gods about a complex system of correspondences that related all beings and events to one another. Omens can be found in many places, including animal entrails, observed in the sky through eclipses, or in everyday life occurrences, such as a spider spinning a web at a window.

Hugo Canoilas’s artistic practice, particularly known for its intersectional interest in ecofeminism and the interaction between natural and artificial environments, explores the physical and oneiric landscapes in this exhibition. Reflecting on the current political and social affairs, the artist was driven by impulses and intimate gestures deeply rooted in the influences of Fantastic Realism, German Magic Realism, Surrealists like Leonora Carrington, as well as Vinciane Despret’s speculative writing.

These influences are vividly depicted in the most recent fluid paintings, in which images as dreamlike visions are painted figuratively, strongly influenced by Kubin’s oeuvre. They are installed in direct relation to Who Killed Cock Robin?1, a series of handmade headwear, first presented as part of the opera Hold Your Breath that premiered this summer at Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Bregenz. This dark, see–through, layered set of hats functions almost like masks, disguising humans into shapes of animals such as a fly, a dove, a sparrow, a fish, and a beetle.

This year I started using Duolingo to learn and practice German. One of its most distinctive aspects is its eccentric sentences, which I‘ve been collecting via screenshots:

“The witch is bringing her date along, he is a bear.”
“My horse collects teeth.”
“I am crying and the onion is laughing.”
“My dog is unemployed and only has one eye.”
“Is she picking the horse up from the train station?”
“We are inviting a snail to the barbecue?”
“My horse is not an artist but an architect.”

The app website explains that these sentences are memorable examples helping learners remember vocabulary and grammar rules more effectively. One cannot help comparing this sentence-building operation with early Surrealist writings, animism — the belief in the “animation of all nature,” that non–human beings, such as animals, plants, mountains, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon can be maintained social relationships with — and naturally, the act of “speaking” and “fantasizing” present in the etymology of the word Fable itself.

Crawling over History (2022) is part of a series of eerie graphite drawings on debris shells. These appear as if they were texts — almost beyond language — evoking and interweaving the historicity of those phantasms and self–made human projections. Canoilas’s animal-human landscapes, captured by delicate and lyrical graphite lines, lend themselves, as in Goya’s work, to exploring the boundaries and mutual overlaps between dream and reality

In Fables, Canoilas presents an oneiric ecosystem of new potentially narrative works that suggest and unfold relational and multiple visions of uncertain futures in a world of the most uncanny visions, where primordial crustacean animals and embryonic-looking hybrid creatures co–exist and interconnect. But by no means can dreams be considered a mere escape from reality, it’s rather about bringing forth the real from its potentiality through imagination.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024_12_04_Martin-Janda_000430_web-scaled.jpg

Text: Jiwon Lee

I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms

To understand the artist Hyunsung Park, it seems essential to begin with her 2018 work, Swinging (https://youtu.be/wcvnkoqdyOI), which is also included in this exhibition, I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms. This video captures the artist endlessly colliding her knees against the gallery wall while swinging on a self-made swing. Propelled by gravity and the pendulum-like motion of her body, the swing repeatedly lunges toward the wall, gradually dismantling the seated artist’s (performer’s) body.

This aggression toward the transparent wall resembles a shocking form of mania, a compulsive self-fracturing. As Heidegger might describe, the authentic self (Eigentliche)—one’s true self—and the inauthentic self (Uneigentliche)—the socially constructed self formed through relationships—are so intertwined that separating them seems to require such destructive acts of self-dismemberment. This act of physical destruction confronts its most extreme form—death—and evokes existential anxiety (Angst), enabling the artist to distinguish her being from the illusory personas that surround her. It is through this obsessive act of rediscovery, within the relational tension between self and others, that Park Hyun-sung’s work finds its foundation and driving force.

Fragmented Bodies

Park’s themes of self-fragmentation and separation become more visually explicit in her recent works, such as I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms (2024) and Digesting Boundaries (2024). These pieces, primarily composed of fabric, extend the tradition of soft sculpture seen in the works of artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eva Hesse, and Lee Bul. Unlike sculptures made of robust materials like steel, stone, or bronze that withstand the passage of time, these works express fragility and transience through delicate and lightweight forms. The soft, flexible fabric evokes human skin, symbolizing human vulnerability in contrast to rigid materials.

In addition to fabric and textiles, Park employs materials such as IV stands, stainless steel, and PVC hoses to create forms that are abstract yet reminiscent of the human body. Layers of mesh fabric, stretched taut or draped loosely over internal stainless steel structures, resemble skin—pierced, pulled, or pooling on the floor. The installation conjures fragmented human forms: sagging skin, severed hands, exposed organs, hollow torsos, and shattered bones. These fragmented, partial representations of the human body echo the destruction and division seen in Swinging, where the artist paradoxically sought to preserve her essential self through acts of disintegration.

Suspended Yet Grounded

Unusually, Park chooses to suspend her works vertically in the exhibition space rather than arranging them horizontally. The resulting vertical structures, appearing to defy gravity as they sometimes flow upward, create a peculiar tension. In fact, tension has been a recurring aesthetic in Park’s work, evident even in her early chair-based sculptures. Across her installations, contrasting elements—hardness and softness, defined forms and anti-forms, order and randomness—engage in a constant push-and-pull at their boundaries. Her pieces, while seemingly painful and contorted like a tortured body, can simultaneously evoke a poignant gesture, as if reaching out for a handshake.

Furthermore, despite being suspended, all of Park’s creations maintain some connection to the ground. Softly cascading fabrics and materials extend downward, barely grazing the floor, but not in a way that firmly supports their weight. This ambiguous connection may offer a key to approaching Park’s work: the feeling of being suspended yet strangely tethered. This delicate point of contact might reflect her way of perceiving the world and engaging with others.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Airborne-Fantasy202401-scaled.jpg

To this end, the artist primarily creates installations involving objects that enter into symbiotic systems through assemblage. The combination of biological and technological elements allows him to reflect on the power of matter as an active substance through which energy flows and information is exchanged.

Lamas collects the materials for his works from a trove of objects found in either nature or urban environments as well as made objects that we typically relate to the milestones of history. Each of the objects selected, regardless of whether they are stone sediments, fragments of the plant and animal kingdoms, or plastic and rubber products and parts of cars, computers and scanners, is an important and equal vessel of information. When different objects are arbitrarily combined, the information inherent in them starts to leap out, overlap and change as the objects increasingly lose their original function. As a result, they no longer belong to their original categories because the meanings within the newly created relationships between them overlap and defy any labelling, while also opening up to multifaceted readings based on associations.

Lamas’ work is rooted in a keen interest in constructed social perception, which is built through the use of systematised knowledge. It thus focuses on the verification of models related to scientific research and the relentless striving for order, control and laws that govern the visible world. It looks for gaps in the ways in which we perceive, interpret and interact with the environment, particularly within the specific relationships between systems of representation and the notion of objective truth and irrefutable facts. That is why the objects he uses are taken from different sources: they are home to both the geological time – within which substances accumulate like sediments – and the linear time of the accelerated technological progress. By bringing various categories and the links between the past and the future together, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on the changing nature of all things that form part of the constant flow of growth, transformation and decay.

The exhibition consists of a selection of works created during the last decade along with the most recent productions. Its layout takes the form of a peculiar archaeological site featuring the remains of building structures, epitaphs of progress and, most certainly, the life, which always finds its way. Inside this dynamic domain, the artist famously highlights the multifaceted nature of changes along with the new meanings, references and values that emerge as an outcome of different materials interacting. Hybrid compositions, made of biological and technological remains and serving as the internal skeletons of both living creatures and machines, are placed inside modular structures reminiscent of urban exoskeletons. His use of platforms on different levels mimics the classification and conservation of artefacts in natural history museums – after all, many of Lamas’ objects could arguably be found in them – while at the same time, by raising the pressing issue of mass hyperconsumption it encourages the viewer to look for the beautiful in the mundane and abandoned.

As suggested by the exhibition title, Scenarios for Coexistence, Lamas is chiefly interested in the relativisation of our existence on the planet. By drawing our attention to other, potential forms of life along with possible interactions between all organisms, the artist reminds us that humanity is but a species and that survival depends on cooperation on a level playing field. Like an archaeologist who, based on clues from the past and without nostalgia, revises anthropological history, Lamas emphasises the rapid changes that increasingly defy our attempts to control them and, above all, explores the present moment in order to be able to better imagine possible future scenarios, new social structures, new modes of existence and coexistence.

Alenka Trebušak

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SFC001low-scaled.jpg

The idea for One of Our Fossils comes from a scientific paper. It predicts that humanity’s most lasting remnants will be plastic, nuclear waste, and chicken bones. I chose chicken bones for their absurdity, and because they represent a world obsessed with making everything cheaper and faster. The exhibition imagines how future civilisations might interpret these bones. It speculates on the myths and stories they might create from them.

It is absurd that, despite our power and ability to foresee the future, our attention span and sense of ‘now’ have rapidly narrowed. One might expect that more foresight would grant a longer view of time. Instead, it is as if we are mentally exhausted from dealing with the present, leaving us with no energy to imagine the future.

One of Our Fossils responds to that condition. It presents a space to reflect and have feelings about the deep future. The bones serve as a starting point to consider what kind of world we will leave behind and how future civilizations might try to make sense of it. It’s an invitation to consider both what we are now and what we are becoming.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/IMG_1013-scaled.jpeg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Footfalls_Gruppe-11.2024-116-von-131-scaled.jpg