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Place: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster

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Curated by: Elke Kania

Works: The Desiring Machines

The Desiring Machines is a sound installation that consists of 220 individually hand-blown glass droplets suspended from a mash net across the ceiling within a two-channel immersive audio soundscape. Each glass drop is unique and offset in its own way, some with streams of deep red ruby glass inside them. Entering the room activates the sound level of the installation, which creates this dialog with the viewer that the title suggests, we are inside a web of desire. The artist writes, “The glass bodies, composed like fixed movement in space, give the impression of a social fabric. Everything is interwoven, everything flows”. The viewer is enveloped in the soundscape based on excerpts from the publication Anti-Oedipus (1977) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. An intentionally hypnotic and difficult to follow text on the “healthy” and “schizophrenic” people in capitalist society - it is unclear who is who.

A lyrical arc of the work spans tells how productive desire can be, how desire bridges gaps and is a force of creation. Attentive observation reveals engravings in some drops - words in which overriding values, longings and desires crystallize literally onto glass. A kind of journey through the human body begins, from its needs and processes to the mundane circulation of bodily fluids. The red hue of some drops can evoke associations with blood but also other connotations of red, a signifier of passion, like glass, something fragile or frozen as if a manifested snapshot, a frozen state of the fluid, the ephemeral, the intangible.

- Text by Elke Kania

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