ALIEN MONUMENTS & CHALKY DUST

Ivana Bašić's Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics 

In the centre of Schinkel Pavilion's octagonal upper hall, an alien structure emerges. Perfect curves of stainless steel grasp upwards and out. On either side, humanoid creatures protrude from long metal arms. They remind me of alien monuments. The surfaces are marblesque, milky white and pink in colour, eerily flawless. The structure is brightly-lit like an operating theatre, a creature caught under searchlights. I feel uncomfortable with how flashy it is. The room seems inhumane. I leave.

Jesse Slater for EXIT Magazine © 2024

I was curious about the unease I felt spending time in Metempsychosis. Exhibitions with high production budgets tend to leave me feeling queasy, something about the wealth of the art world being abundantly on show. This had an added edge, something uncanny. After leaving, I sat down outside with the exhibition literature, eager to read about the central installation. I see that the domineering humanoid creatures are actually made from glass, not some cold alien space rock. They are fragile, earthly. I look back at the photos I took and other vulnerabilities show. Internal organs spill from slashes in their bodies, some looking like fleshy genitalia. Their spines curve over, heads bowed, as if protecting themselves. The metal structure seems to exact them, like forceps or retractors. All of a sudden, they appear tender to me, representing the body under structural strain.

In the centre of the installation, spikes of metal like surgical tools hold up a lump of rock. White chalky dust is smattered on the floor. I find that the stone is alabaster, the soft rock used for carvings. It's malleable, delicate enough to be formed. Every half hour, the metal machine of the installation slips into action, the tools chipping away at the rock in the rhythm of the artist's breath. The artist is present, if only through the structure of the machine, slowly pressing into the fragility of the rock.

The more I think of it, my taste has little to do with why I was disturbed by the slickness of the exhibition. Bašić created a space where human messiness is under strict control. Bodies are smoothed over, minimised to "perfect" forms, their injuries aestheticised to the point you don't even notice them. The undulating curves of glass, spilling guts, are graceful. The machine pins down the soft rock, slowly eroding at its own pace. The shininess of the alien statues only looks more imperious in contrast to the dust.

My sense of unease didn't follow me around the whole exhibition. As I went from room to room, I was most drawn to Bašić's drawings. They are fleshy, foetal, intimate; twists of pink like the insides of a body. They seem to gently thrum. There is a texture of vulnerability, sketchiness, a welcome sigh amongst the metal. 

Metempsychosis made me cringe, in a very physical sort of way. It created the sensation of the body under pressure, the body experiencing violence, the body forced to conform. Bašić has related her work to her lived experience growing up during the Yugoslavia war, under fear of morbid harm. The exhibition comes as genocidal atrocities are committed against people in Palestine with at least 40,100 killed so far by Israeli forces. In the West, we become accustomed to watching the genocide from afar through our cold mobile phone screens. The violence inflicted on Palestinian people is compounded into mere images for many. Metempsychosis reminds me of this. Injury is presented as aesthetic detail, easily missed. This genocide has also drawn more attention to the rise of technological warfare through AI. The machine is a proxy for systematic violence. There's a parallel here with Bašić's installation, programmed to slowly chip away at the lump of alabaster.

I struggle to relate art exhibitions, especially institutional ones, to such real, morbid events happening in the world right now. It feels uncomfortable to make this parallel, as if any comparison to traumatic events, whether through art or writing, disrespects them somehow, trivialises them. However, it's impossible not to relate this exhibition to its context. Bašić silently uses the glitzy aesthetics of the institution and flawless command of her materials to represent how much violence can exist in plain sight. I come away feeling disquiet, thumbing at my place within this structure of silence and violence.

Jesse Slater is a curator and writer whose interests lie in messiness, ephemerality, and queering means of artistic production. They live and work in Berlin. 

Contact: jesse (at) exit030.com