(2019–)

In a world made strange by human action, subjects struggle to cohere. Seas rise, art feeds AI, all that is solid melts into banks. We’re suspended in a hurricane with our dining table and chablis 10,000 meters in the air, telling stories of the ground. Perhaps it’s always been this way. Schall is still flüssig, we can sink in it and never drown. An image, too; a mark; an internet; a neural net. For every question, infinite answers, some of them right, or right for now.

Proposing that our polycrisis is at heart a crisis of imagination, the Meltiverse project de- and re-constructs the given using image, text, and sound. Meltiverse – Teil 1, a 2023 solo exhibition, contained the first part of this research: video installations, modified historical instruments, drawings, wearables, 3D renders, excerpts from a novel, and sculpture. Further developments were exhibited during “Dark Botanicals“, an exhibition at Galerie Peter Gaugy, Vienna, alongside work by Ernst Lima, Laetizia Wirth, Therés Cassini, Hamid Yaraghchi, and Lauren Nickou in Summer 2024; and in Hyper-Orientation, an exhibition with Eva Schlegel and Ernst Lima at Peter Gaugy Brussels in Fall 2024.

The works draw on lived trans* experience, low theory, and the ever-presence of the archive. Plato worried writing would destroy memory and curb imagination: we may not be so different in our concerns. While men with goggle toys sell us our world but worse, The Meltiverse asks: what stories of difference we might tell instead? What might a monster know that we could learn? What was your original face before your parents were born?

Meltiverse: Teil 1 was exhibited at Galerie Peter Gaugy during Vienna Art Week 2023, with a performance, Verdampfung 1, at the finissage. Components of the exhibition were also seen in modified form during Reverse Cowgirl β, performed at brut wien shortly thereafter.

The Meltiverse project is generously supported by the Ministry for Inner Images, whose entirely fictional activities generously support the mission of the Department of Performance Quality, whose real activities generously support the generous support of the Ministry for Inner Images, for which we thank them, truly.