T(n)C aka Agnes Varnai & Tina Kult // Surface Tension
Screens that refuse to glow, the cyclic journey of the last survivor, and dreaming robots choosing laziness over productivity — in Surface Tension the artist duo T(n)C – Agnes Varnai & Tina Kult bring together a constellation of interconnected multimedia works created over the past four years. The exhibition explores what might grow from the cracks of failing systems and what new forms of existence could sprout under perpetual pressure.
Schedule
─── optics locked in ──── t(n)c’s meditative video works mobilise science fiction’s relentlessly reiterated motifs, yet in ways that expose their underlying modes of thought:
above all, the mind slipping out of the body or being transplanted into a machine. the cybernisation of the human and the humanisation of the cyborg function only within the dualist lineage of the philosophy of mind – a lineage that presupposes already separated entities. [...]
yet all hybridisation signals a crisis or even worse: an utterly boring catastrophe. from this perspective, it is the body that becomes a cybernetic unit not by being abandoned by the mind, but by entering into new configurations of forces, intensities and capacities – a body that [...] deterritorializes through the painful and formative experience of immaterial and material forms of labour… much ado about the desire of a virtual paradise…
another motif is, of course, the post-apocalypse – not merely the contradiction between the world and its end, but a zone of indiscernibility where the image of the present and the iron law of its liberalist utopia [...] are propelled into a future already fractured. what immerses us here is not a linear projection but an affective suspension: an asymmetry between world and end-of-world, between being and non-being, that has nothing to do with causality or dialectics.
and yet again we are reminded: escapism is the worst enemy of escaping. ─── optics turned off ────
artists: T(n)C aka Agnes Varnai & Tina Kult
conceptual drive-by: eden_jeneses & Omon Wynfryth
exhibition sponsors: Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest, Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport Republic of Austria, Hullám-Pack Kft.
art quarter budapest
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