In A Holding Pattern 2.0

breathing.systems at Bristol Trinity

A sound capture of the moments between time, space and stages of the Field Maneuvers festival
🌀 Enter the Zone 🌀

Pacifist Techno Sanctuary at FM 2023 w/ Ni-Ku

Soundtrack written for Marcin Gawin's 'Hermaphrogenesis' exhibition at VSSL Studio, Deptford, London January 2024.

"Long ago, in the ancient world, the organs and entrails of animals were decoded by those tasked with defining the limits of reality.  Marcin Gawin’s transmedial installation converts this ancient instinct into a bioqueer art form through a new media landscape. Gawin’s neo-goth, psychedelic laboratory/chapel circumnavigates their ongoing interest in re-imagining biology as material for queer potentiality. The work transposes symbols from the sciences, religion, and the occult into new media collages, inviting the audience into an immersive hallucination, invoking organs as ruins for the posthuman body.

Four metallic light boxes are suspended from the ceiling using meat hooks and chains. A trinity of hand-crafted silicone organs– lungs, intestine, stomach – are re-arranged by the artist into mutant formations, evoking floral still-life compositions and inverted Rorschach ink splots. At the center of the installation is Gawin’s arcane codex; an anatomical atlas turned grimoire. This textbook is annotated with biomorphic hieroglyphics and neomedieval illuminations. Five other lightboxes are presented as a pentalogy of icons, featuring a brain stem the artist has stylistically split into five. Gawin’s iconographies reproduce
anthropomorphic, androgynous forms with a tentacular symmetry, echoing the worlds of manga, and erotica.

The organs at the nucleus of Gawin’s queer temple perform as skinned internal landscapes, a micro-interiority ripped open, exposed, and remythologized as queer talismans. HERMAPHROGENESIS sanctifies pareidolia–the process of perceiving meaningful images in ambiguous visual patterns–and elevates it to a metaphor for queerness."

In A Holding Pattern 2.0

Daniel Copeman

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Oscar Kreijtz

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