Neo-rising

Stef Van Looveren, Mel Odom, Floryan Varennes

Curated by Monika Čejková

At Polansky Gallery, Prague

June 03 — July 16, 2022

Photography by Jan Kolský

We are living in a time of the heightened transformation of the human body, the physical transformation into fluid digital matter in all aspects of our lives. We are subjects of embodied fantasies in which we may become somebody completely different – forever, for some time or just for one post.

Neo-rising presents the work of Stef Van Looveren, Mel Odom, Floryan Varennes, which is characterized by tendencies towards themes of romantic love and eroticism, depicted on layers of cyber culture, queer themes and references to the post-gender and post-human world.
 

Neo-rising is a spin-off of the 2020 exhibition project Fantasy Finery.

Human body
The human body is the physical substance of the human organism, composed of living cells and extracellular materials and organized into tissues, organs, and systems.
source: britannica.com/science/human-body, accessed on 14 February 2022

Cyborg
A hybrid being: half human, half machine (a contraction of ‘cybernetic organism’). The term was first coined in 1960 by the Austrian-American space scientist Manfred Clynes (b.1925), though such creatures had featured in science-fiction since the 1920s and they have long been with us in everyday life in the form of mechanical elements (such as prosthetic limbs) incorporated into the human body.
source: Daniel Chandler, Rod Munday, A Dictionary of Media and Communication, Oxford University Press, 2011

Postgenderism 
Postgenderism as a cultural phenomenon has roots in feminism, masculism, along with the androgyny, metrosexual/technosexual and transgender movements. However, it has been through the application of transhumanist philosophy that postgenderists have conceived the potential for actual morphological changes to the members of the human species and how future humans in a postgender society will reproduce. In this sense, it is an offshoot of transhumanism, posthumanism, and futurism.
source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgenderism, accessed on 25 May 2022

Posthuman
The idea that either the human species is at an evolutionary dead-end, and must incorporate technologies in order to evolve to the ‘next level’, or that we have long ceased to be human, because of our increasingly intimate relationships with nonhumans, such as technological artefacts.
source: David Bell, Cyberculture Theorists, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, Routledge New York, 2007

Fantasy Finery
Fantasy Finery was an exhibition held at Berlínskej model, Prague, in 2020. The exhibition was inspired by the Westworld television series and by sophisticated sexual technologies powered by AI. It broadened the horizons of pleasure, developed intimate relationships and set desires within digisexuality.

— Monika Čejková

Neo-rising, Exhibition View, Polansky Gallery, 2022
Neo-rising, Exhibition View, Polansky Gallery, 2022
Neo-rising, Exhibition View, Polansky Gallery, 2022
Stef Van Looveren, BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, 2020
pigment, silicone, steel, diamonds 53 x 23 x 53 cm (object)
Stef Van Looveren, BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, 2020
pigment, silicone, steel, diamonds 53 x 23 x 53 cm (object)
Stef Van Looveren, BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, 2020
pigment, silicone, steel, diamonds 53 x 23 x 53 cm (object)
Stef Van Looveren, BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, 2020
pigment, silicone, steel, diamonds 53 x 23 x 53 cm (object)
Mel Odom, Enigma, 1980 
colour print (reproduction of drawing: pencil, dyes and gouache) 160 x 120 cm 

Neo-rising, Exhibition View, Polansky Gallery, 2022
Neo-rising, Exhibition View, Polansky Gallery, 2022
Floryan Varennes, Mirari: A Life Relieved, 2022 3D video 04:08
co-created with Harriet Davey & Imogen Davey
Floryan Varennes, Matriarche, 2022
muzzles, medical tubes, medical PVC, stainless-steel fasteners, rivets, rings, medical instruments
160 x 160 cm
Floryan Varennes, Matriarche, 2022, detail
muzzles, medical tubes, medical PVC, stainless-steel fasteners, rivets, rings, medical instruments
160 x 160 cm
Floryan Varennes, Matriarche, 2022
muzzles, medical tubes, medical PVC, stainless-steel fasteners, rivets, rings, medical instruments
160 x 160 cm
Floryan Varennes, Matriarche, 2022, detail
muzzles, medical tubes, medical PVC, stainless-steel fasteners, rivets, rings, medical instruments
160 x 160 cm
Floryan Varennes, Matriarche, 2022, detail
muzzles, medical tubes, medical PVC, stainless-steel fasteners, rivets, rings, medical instruments
160 x 160 cm
Mel Odom Bound Man, 1990 colour print (reproduction of drawing: pencil, dyes and gouache)
45 x 32 cm
Mel Odom, Enigma, 1980 
colour print (reproduction of drawing: pencil, dyes and gouache)
160 x 120 cm


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