The Desiring Machines

Language reveals to us a profound insight: “I am not my body, I have a body.” As a consequence of the realization that the body is not one’s own person, the question arises as to the substance that animates the human being. The exhibition is dedicated to this question on the basis of the works of art on display. The focus is on exploring the factors that determine the creation of an image. Which energy flows lead to the picture? How or what brings the work to life? The exhibition explores the subtle levels and invisible spaces inherent in a work of art.

Isabella Fürnkäs explores the physical interstices between human and machine, masculinity and femininity. Drawing on Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze, she incorporates quotations that address the fluid processes of the body, its circulation, and its needs. It seems as though the "male thought" takes on a new form through the female voice of Moira Barrett—transformed and repositioned. The mind of the viewer and listener itself becomes a vessel in which a fluid web of its own thoughts emerges. The floating, tranquil glass droplets appear to transform into fundamental human sensations, questioning their material nature. One thing is certain: we are not our feelings—they are merely a fragment of the infinite abundance of our consciousness.

- Text by Adriane Wachholz

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