[re]birth / you melt my heart
installation, sculptures
[re]birth / you melt my heart began from the sense that we live inside a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. The earth is changing and so are we, and the exhibition set out to ask what a life beyond the human might look like, and what visions of the world might follow from it. Four fine art students from HKU and KASK took the question into the EXbunker and answered it in a single site specific installation, one that turned the space itself into the argument.
A bunker is a structure built for survival, for waiting out a catastrophe behind thick walls, and that made it the fitting host for the world the artists imagined. They transformed it into a space of potential life, something close to an ark or a seed vault, holding the conditions for flourishing until flourishing becomes possible again. The reference point was the Global Seed Vault buried in the Norwegian permafrost, where seeds lie frozen against the worst, and here too the room became a repository of what might grow back. New ground was laid for nature to begin sprouting, and artefacts of a lost past surfaced through it, tangled together with habits both recent and old, until the installation read as a speculative reality that never strays far from our own.
Katharina Busl's pair of ceramic sculptures, Vivipary Study 1 and Object F2, emerged from the soil as though thriving in some strange new environment. Seen up close they became living organisms, biotic forms caught in transformation that seemed to grow and evolve in front of the viewer. Familiar and unfamiliar at once, they belonged to the new biosphere the show imagined rising from the ruins of a lost age.
Junhao Xiang contributed Cycle 0-1-0, a work in clay and resin built around the circulation of the natural system and the artist's own place inside it. Its accompanying text ran like an incantation of giving birth and renewing the earth, of burying soil and flowers, of crystals slowly becoming part of the body until roots and breath and the last words of a life poem ran together. The piece held death and rebirth inside the single cycle its title quietly counts out.
Vincent Entekhabi's two channel video installation, Into Which a Stream Sinks, took the slow making of a dripstone cave as its image, droplets falling and hardening from stalactite to stalagmite until they met in a single pillar. Here time worked less as an eroding force than as a patient tool, letting repeated gestures gather into form. Against that geological slowness the work set the speed of media consumption and its pull on how we build a sense of self, with particular attention to the patriarchal ideas of masculinity that circulate on social media.
Gucheva showed three glazed ceramic works, Aerial Vortex, Altar of Creusa and Sundews' Touch, objects cast as relics of time in which past and future blend. Amulets and oracular vessels, they opened onto another realm, a place of transition and wild growth where imagination might mutate and worlds merge. Around them the work conjured the dance of nymphs and water sprites in muddy water and the sacred habitat of shadows, a homage to a lost past that still held the power to fertilise new ground.
ExBunker, Utrecht, 2023
Photography by Vincent Entekhabi