Inside Job: Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus, Botond Keresztesi

Aldea Gallery is pleased to announce Inside Job (Ula Lucińska, Michał Knychaus) & Botond Keresztesi

Inside Job (Ula Lucińska, Michał Knychaus) and Botond Keresztesi, met in 2021, during their participation  in the 34th Ljubljana Biennale. The three bonded over their interest in creating multi-layered environ ments as simulations of algorithmic and speculative thinking. Their similar aesthetic sensibility references  a contemporary visual language that merges the digital and the analog and plays with concepts of flatness  and assemblage to combine organic and inorganic matter in representations of posthumanist philoso phies. The exhibition at ALDEA is the resulting exploration of all these intersecting interests that have  been developed by the three artists, during the month they spent living and working side by side in Ber gen.  

Inside Job uses industrial and recycled materials to create installations and sculptural objects. For the work  on view, they found mahogany from old cargo ships in Bergen, in which they milled and carved fossil ized shapes of extinct species. Trilobites and ammonites emerge from the wood or the metal used by the  artists and are further combined with laser-cut brass and stainless steel elements. These fractal-like metal  shapes have a post-industrial technological coldness to them, whilst simultaneously evoking nature-in spired pagan elements. The assemblages, through their oscillation between temporal representations,  and fusion of organic and inorganic materials, suspend the sense of temporality in the space.  

In a similar fashion, Botond Keresztesi’s paintings depict self-standing techno-organic forms, transposed  on canvas in oil and acrylic. These ouroboros-like creatures, seem to be captured in movement, as they are  morphing and incorporating pieces of machinery, robotics, animals, bones, as well as decorative Art-Nou veau shapes and root-like ornaments. These self-standing compositions are floating on airbrushed back grounds of landscapes or colorful abstraction, and they appear as flashbacks of dream-like scenarios of  retro-futuristic predictions.  

The two practices have nourished a dialogue that is palpable throughout the exhibition and that high lights the artists’ interest in exploring new ontological classifications. These new classifications carry the  hope of potential reconciliation between two concurring forces that are currently unfolding at a scorching  pace: technological development and climate destruction. The techno-organic creatures not only capture  but also amplify the speed of this speculative merger, as they are themselves transformed into what the  artists call “technofossils”.  

The exhibition captures the unmetabolized anxieties of our collective unconscious and it depicts the murk iness of the epistemological crisis that we – as humanity – are currently experiencing. Uneasy as it seems,  within this ungraspable scale of deep time and moving matter – set at work by both our species and by  powers that are now far beyond it – the exhibition finds a comforting pattern in accepting the continuous  mutation of form, consciousness, and sensitivity. Moreover, working through the anxieties of envisioning  futures that are decentering the human, the artworks make use of the limitless reconfigurations of both  consciousness and technology, to help us mold viable posthuman co-adaptations with and within nature.