Charlottenburger Chaussee 109
13597 Berlin
030 3325772
marian@ich.ms
Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
A storm cuts through the Schinkel Pavillon’s historic building as clouds of dust wander across the first institutional solo exhibition of New York-based artist Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia). Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presents sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić's poetic, deeply nuanced material language.
Image gallery
Ivana Bašić Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
Ivana Bašić Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
Ivana Bašić Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
Ivana Bašić Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.
In the center of the exhibition is a seven-meter-wide, site-specific sculpture that will take up the entire first-floor hall. At the core of this sculpture, between two large lobes of glass, small pneumatic metal hammers are gradually pounding an alabaster stone into dust—merging with the floating clouds of dust already inhabiting the exhibition space. Driven by air-pressure, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma, ”breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings—those powered by the "breath of life”, the spirit that transforms beyond the material realm.
On the ground floor visitors are invited to explore more figures in different states of transformation, accompanied by drawings that evoke womb-like forms, nebulaes and cellular life, as if the sculptures have been birthed within them. In several sculptures, flesh-colored folds of skin are surrounded by shiny plates of bronze armor, seemingly to protect their tender flesh.
At once tender and violent, each of Bašić's hand-made sculptures combine vastly disparate materials— wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster—into figures approximately human in scale, evoking human skin, womb fluids, and insect bodies, all of which are in the process of transformation or dissolution.
Fixed to the ceilings and floors, or crawling into the walls, to be protected from the violence of the oncoming storm, the figures in Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics gradually shift into a disembodies state, ultimately freeing themselves from their forms, and turning into ethereal dust.
