OFLUXO

Labyrinth gives way to skin, Sonica’s 2021 theme, taken from the title of a composition by Maryanne Amacher for Merce Cunningham Dance Company, serves as a launching point for an exploration of the invisible forces surrounding and emanating from our bodies in relation to our environment, one another, and the multitudinous entities that comprise ourselves. From the subtle bodies, a non-dualist Eastern mystical and medical concept of the holism of mind/body dynamics and energy flows, we extend our presence to notions of the social, collective, and cyborgian bodies, opening the possibility that our bodies are not only our own.

The festival’s accompanying exhibition Boundless Bodyminds features new video works from Aïsha Devi’s mysterious SLF collective, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė (Young Girl Reading Group), and Marija Bozinovska Jones with a screening from the latest iteration of Sophie Hoyle’s ‘Chronica’ series, and commissioned lenticular print from Jessika Khazrik extending from her ongoing Pharmakopoeia project. The videos incorporate soundtracks composed by underground electronic music luminaries Aïsha Devi, Bill Kouligas, 33EMYBW and J.G. Biberkopf.

Every artist in this exhibition has put embodied cognition front and center in their explorations of spiritual realms and rituals, some with ancient origins, which exist at the intersections of current scientific, technological, and art methodological practices. A number of the artists employ the latest techniques in AI language or image processing while others have chosen fully analog in-camera manipulation or documentarian style. Regardless of their methods and chosen aesthetic, at the core of these projects is an understanding of personhood as collective, and flowing forth from this ever-in-flux congregation, a proposal towards a collective initiation for healing and sympoetic growth; an expansion beyond the limits of the known and knowable however situated within the unity of our cybernetically extended spirit infused material form.

Marija Bozinovska Jones
Beginningless Mind (rivers, rhythms, rituals), 2021

The (rivers, rhythms, rituals) edition of Beginningless Mind explores embodied knowledge through movement in collaboration with choreographer Franka Marlene Foth. In search of a sense of belonging through a shared reality, Beginningless Mind probes collective worldmaking. It voices Wikipedia as a knowledge commons and maps it onto web searches using Natural Language Processing, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence. The search engine results produced by algorithms which index knowledge, are translated into a kinaesthetic vernacular, in a gesture where the verbal collapses meaning onto movement.

To transcend the limitations of language, Beginningless Mind views the mind as embodied intelligence with porous boundaries in primordial interrelationship with the more-than-human. A view of the body as a collective assemblage of social, material and unknowable multitudes, queers anthropocentric scripts. Observing a (post)colonial symbiosis of nature and culture, the work levels out scientific approaches with ancient systems of beliefs. The narrative examines a flowing process of interconnectedness, following life on Earth where energy and information unwind cosmic law from order to disorder. Here the earthling is the youngest, yet most detrimental species. Starting where we are, we can begin to refine our consciousness towards universal kinship.

Marija Bozinovska Jones (MBJ/ MBJ Wetware*) explores links between social, computational and organic architectures. Working across audiovisual formats, installation, ephemeral mediums and in live context, her works revolve around technological amplification and unpack cryptic ways of forging subjectivity. MBJ often maps biochemical onto algorithmic components, probing notions of selfhood from subatomic level to networked presence on planetary scale and beyond. Grounded in a belief that worldmaking is an intrinsically collective process, MBJ regularly collaborates with researchers, programmers, holistic practitioners and other artists. Beginningless Mind was originally commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices, University of Salford Art Collection and Somerset House Studios.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
Mouthless Part I, 2020

Drawing on their research into accounts of witch trials in Fribourg, Switzerland, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s video, Mouthless Part I, presents a fractured narrative of a family attempting to conjure spirits of humans, plants, animals and other beings resisting classification. The visual collage combines reading performance documentation, algorithmically generated animation and shots of eerie landscapes. With a script compiled from excerpts of both critical theory and fiction, Mouthless Part I presents a textured exploration of the relationship between nature, folklore and horror. Through the additional lens of Eastern European mythic tales, magical rites, and healing practices that conceive of undead characters spawning from soil, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė raise vital, future-facing questions about what continues to lurk in landscapes and hint towards new forms of collective practices.

Dorota Gawęda (PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT) are an artist duo based in Basel (CH). Both are 2012 graduates of the Royal College of Art in London. Their work spans performance, installation, fragrance, sculpture, drawing, photography and video. They are the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–) and co-initiators of its online archive. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė are among the finalists of the Swiss Art Awards 2021. The duo are represented by Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London and Lucas Hirsch Gallery in Düsseldorf.

Sophie Hoyle
Hyperacusis (Chronica), 2021

Hyperacusis (Chronica) is a film exploring mental health and trauma, access to healthcare, transcultural psychiatry, and the intergenerational impacts of racism, colonialism and other socioeconomic inequalities. It includes a dance collaboration with French artist Jule Lanoix, interviews with psychiatrist/film-maker Khaldoon Ahmed, musician and writer Blue Maignien, and artist, DJ, teacher and musician Chooc Ly Tan. Experiments took place at UrsuLAB, a biohacking lab based at Antre Peaux, founded by Kina Madno (Quimera Rosa); this footage is used to explore Western scientific constructs and narratives around migration, race and the categorisation of social groups.

Sophie Hoyle is an artist and writer whose practice explores an intersectional approach to post-colonial, queer, feminist, critical psychiatry and disability issues. Their work looks at the relation of the personal to (and as) political, individual and collective anxieties, and how alliances can be formed where different kinds of inequality and marginalisation intersect. They relate personal experiences of being queer, non-binary and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence. From lived experience of disability and mental illness including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), they began to explore the history of biomedical technologies and treatments that overlap with state and military control.

Jessika Khazrik
Pharmakopoeia Scroll I, 2021

Khazrik’s Pharmakopoeia project is a response to the immediacy of our coronial present, situated within the eternal search for healing, investigating the interlinks between remedies described in ancient Persian alchemical manuscripts and the media environment which dominates our daily lives now. It takes a trans-millenial and open-access approach to experience and knowledge, seeking to collectively create and revive formulas of shared remedies for not only bodies and space, but also systems of knowledge and unlearning. Pharmakopoeia is a long term, multi-format project; it’s first iteration was launched in Spring 2021 and took the form of 7 hypervideo anti-ads and subsequently the first chapter of a trans-millennial compendium of healing accessible via https://pharmakopoeia.society.systems

Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991, Beirut, based between Beirut and Berlin) is an artist, technologist, electronic music producer and writer whose interdisciplinary practice ranges from composition to machine learning, ecotoxicology, cryptography, performance, visual art and history of science. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and Theatre from the Lebanese University and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.  While concurrently working as technologist and technology advisor in various informal collective and institutional settings, her work has been presented at The Normandy Landfill, raves, the Stanford Research Institute, CTM Festival, the Arab Image Foundation, Kunsthalle Wien, Les Urbaines, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Times Museum Guangzhou, LUMA Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, her house, the internet and Theater der Welt, among others. Her essays and short stories have been published in Bidayat Journal, Zweikommasieben, Kohl Journal, The Funambulist, Almodon and Ibraaz to name a few. Besides her solo practice, Khazrik composes the soundtracks for the Geocinema film project, often collaborates with artists and labels on album art and text, and DJs.

SLF
The Sacred Show, 2021

Spirit Liberation Front (SLF) is a mysterious, omniform artist collective helmed by Aïsha Devi. Their first official output is the cryptic film ‘The Sacred Show’ co-created with Swiss artist 118 a.k.a. Alec Ross and originally commissioned by Rewire Festival. In ‘The Sacred Show’, a surrealist confessional style film, protagonists Destiny and Flowerboy are spirits inhabiting a liminal world in the pursuit of their unfulfilled dreams. SLF’s practice seeks to use the popular culture and language of the internet and upend it through injections of subliminal alchemical wisdom, flipping reality on its head.