Metempsychosis: The Passion of PneumaticsIvana Bašić
Schinkel Pavillon
Berlin
.–
Progressing like a rite of passage, Ivana Bašić’s presentation transforms both floors of the Schinkel’s iconic octagon-shaped building into a journey that examines the material and metaphysical bounds of humanity.
Debuting more than 20 new pieces, the exhibition weaves together sculptures, drawings, video, and an 23-feet-wide animatronic altarpiece into a surreal journey that contemplates the dissolution of the body and the material world, not as a loss, but as a moment of radical potential.
Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, and brutality brought on by the collapse of her native Yugoslavia, Bašić’s works investigate our most pressing ontological fixations: the fragility of the human condition; the breakdown of self and the Other; the reimagination of life and death; and the quest for immortality. Bašić's hybrid bodies contemplate metamorphosis as a substitute for physical flight, both on an individual level and collectively as a society. Can transformation be the way out, when there is nowhere left to retreat or hide?
Approximately human in scale, each of Bašić's sculptures combines disparate materials—wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster—into a unique symbolic material language consistent across the artist’s practice. Evoking womb fluids, and insectile bodies, the figures are at once violent and tender, suggesting primordial forces of the underground and unseen.
Significant objects in the show include a chimeric half-insectile, half-machine sculpture reminiscent of a praying mantis, which in Ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures was seen as an oracle and guide into the afterlife. Another sculpture seems to give birth to itself, pressing its own amniotic-hued glass head through its loins. Two biomechanical figures emerge from either end of an altar-like centerpiece. Their flesh-coloured folds of skin surrounded by shiny plates of armor—seemingly to protect the soft figures as they blossom and dissolve their human shells.
The exhibition title, Passion of Pneumatics, refers to the exhibition’s centerpiece, inspired by Italian Renaissance images of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Here, the sun-like rays of the Immaculate Heart are replaced with pneumatic hammers that gradually pound a stone to dust at the sculpture’s core. Using the force of compressed air, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma, “breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings—those powered by the spirit, “the breath of life”, who transcend the material realm.
The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Balkan Projects, Albion Jeune, Francesca Minini, Cusson Cheng, Yvan Vanmol and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Schinkel Pavillon e.V. is supported by the Senate Departement for Culture and Social Cohesion, Berlin.