Your practice explores a world in between real and virtual. Where are your inspirations coming from, and why is this in-between an essential thematic today?
To me, the in-between feels like the gray zone between some established binaries. We all tend to think in opposites, but we don’t necessarily operate in them, the in-between is a site of contestation and the place where ideas and reality can be redefined. As an angsty teenager, I wore a “Panta Rei” necklace, some relatively cliché merch from the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus, to remind me that things can change, and everything is in flux – this sentiment has stuck with me into the present. With this perspective of embracing change, we recognise that we are always between our past and future, that’s the necessary purgatory of human existence. I guess this is an essential theme in a world where technology is accelerating at a pace that we haven’t experienced before, everything feels liquid and in constant movement. Perhaps some aspects of technology, and COVID-19 for that matter, forced a narrative of the need to ‘return to normal’, as if we are stuck in between, as if overcoming a hurdle delivers you back to where you were before you hit it. I could throw out my iPhone tomorrow, but I wouldn’t return to my life before the iPhone because that experience is written on my body and equally the world has shifted to accommodate it.
In your exhibitions “Cold sleep” at Tranen and “Thermal Womb “at Annka Kultys Gallery (London), you explore the possibility of immortality through cryopreservation. Is art allowing us to engage in a conversation about it easier?
Absolutely, I think art can function as a kind of incubator of new perspectives. So many things in the world are intangible, hard to grasp or even consider, through art we can make these things or ideas visible. Of course, it’s always a very subjective representation, but perhaps that’s even better when it comes to conversation starters. Bringing cryopreservation and ideas around immortality into the exhibition space has been a real gift for me, I can’t count the numerous interesting and intimate conversations I have had with people about death and their hopes for the future.
Could you speak about your last project, “Dawn Chorus”?
Dawn Chorus is the third and last part of my cryopreservation trilogy, after Last Resort and Cold Sleep. I wanted this installation to mark an awakening both hypothetically and literally. The ice has melted, and this is the moment all the patients have longed for, when technology has had a big enough breakthrough to make resurrection possible. When all the cryopreserved bodies can finally sing in a new day. I got the idea for the strollers when I was walking my newborn daughter around London Fields. At that time I was thinking of the pushchair as a kind of portal through which she was able to experience the outside world.
