Scope BLN
presents
EMERGENT ALCHEMIES
NIMROD ASTARHAN, DRINKMILK, JOSEPH JAMES FRANCIS, IMAN IRANNEJAD, IDA SOPHIA, JESSICA TUCKER
March 14 – April 4, 2025
Finissage: Friday, April 4 at 06:00 PM
The group exhibition EMERGENT ALCHEMIES presents works by current artists in residence at Scope BLN.
The project brings together creation processes of artistic objectivity, which explore the contemporary conditions of materiality and its expanded meanings. By incorporating a range of media – analog and digital, organic and synthetic, traditional and new – this exhibition achieves an ecological approach to objectivity, as a field for rethinking and redefining materiality, which is fluid, interconnected and constantly in flux. Today, materiality is often defined by the manipulation of traditional media or extends into the digital, "speculative" field of the way in which the artist engages with the idea of "substance", understood as a dynamic process rather than a static entity of the physical object. In a post humanist era defined by virtual economies, algorithmic processes and immaterial labor, EMERGENT ALCHEMIES explores the new "universal material" that transcends tangible substance and engages with the post-material.
Such contemporary "alchemy" is reflected in works such as Cycles by Jessica Tucker where the artist trains AI models on her own face and applies these to process motion data captured during her pas de deux with a life-size ragdoll. By repurposing "community" sourced deepfake porn workflows, she summons new monstrosities that subvert the automated voyeuristic and surveillance gazes that seek to quantify and exploit the body.
The parallels between the tradition of objective information storage and the creation of database volumes are also explored in the installation by Drinkmilk (Luc Cimino and Gracie Margherita Elbel). In this case, the pork fat in the work literalizes the processes of accumulation and download. It is a working metaphor for the processes and processing of information, with only the methods of extraction and storage being different from antiquity to the present day.
The practical genealogy of technology lies in the Primordial Germanium by Nimrod Astarhan. The work employs metal-point drawings on paper, a technique used for mark-making since antiquity. The automated drawings depict mining sites, landscapes, and artifacts associated with copper, silver, and germanium extraction and processing, used in modern technologies. It invites viewers to consider the hidden cost, leftover dirt, and haunting ontologies embedded in our digital devices and their functions.
The works from Ida Sophia's series, Hope Dies Last, materializing our dedication to hope, gives them a physical present that serves to legitimize our petition for the hope realized - no matter the cost - because in the end, hope dies last. Echoing the format of ex-voto religious offerings, here, the repetitive text relays the relentless and obsessive nature of the hopes we hold and act upon.
The sound sculpture Echoes of Prometheus by Joseph James Francis explores the intersection of material-based, process-led practice and sound art theory, challenging conventional distinctions between sculpture and instrument. This piece is an instrument without sonic precedent. The artist draws from the Italian futurists’ radical rejection of traditional sonic expectations, combined with the sculptural minimalism of authors like Brancusi. By integrating a sonic element, the sculpture invites the viewer not only to see but to touch, an action rarely permitted in the gallery context.
Experimentation with the material and the process of painting at a time when the production and reproduction of forms and objects are in themselves a major problem for exploration, defines the new paintings by Iman Irannejad. The artist uses an image transfer technique, drawing the object onto a stencil, which is then hand-printed onto the canvas. Such manual data transfer, of course, reflects both on the material image and its perception by the viewer.
Opening: Friday, March 14 at 06:00 PM
Scope BLN Project Space and Scope BLN Cinema Room
Lübecker Str. 43 10559 Berlin
Working Hours: Friday – Saturday from 2 to 6 PM