Artverse: To Make a World of Sediment and Sky
with Camilla Alberti

Galerie Urs Meile: Time Out of Joint

The 6th VH Award Exhibitions

Photo Credit: Franz Wamhof

Photo Credit: Nicolas Gysin

Photo Credit: sonongji

Photo Credit: Ars Electronica. Photographer: vog.photo

Photo Credit: Ars Electronica. Photographer: Patrick Proier

Arebyte: Slipstream

“Seven international artists explore cultural heritage as a lens for imagining alternative, beyond-Western, futures through video, sculptural and interactive installations.

Science fiction has long operated as a medium to envision potential futures, yet its alternative realities have often reproduced colonial worldviews, overlooking Indigenous perspectives and other systems of knowledge, or in some cases, casting accounts of colonialism as ‘adventure stories’.

SLIPSTREAMbrings together artists who reclaim the decolonial potential of speculative fiction. Central to the exhibition is the concept of ‘slipstream,’ whose origins in Native science fiction literature are rarely acknowledged. Reasserted through this lineage, ‘slipstream’ carries a decolonial charge. It reconfigures the power structures prevalent in mainstream sci-fi, placing Indigenous figures as active agents rather than colonised subjects. To live in the slip-space is to drift between temporalities, where past, present and future flow together like currents in a navigable stream, and between states of consciousness.”

Photo credit: Devika Bilimoria.

MU Hybrid Art House: Metabolising Time

“For centuries, the Western conception of time has been shaped by a single narrative of civilisation: that of progress, acceleration, standardisation, control and technological mastery. Time as a linear horizon – something to be conquered, optimised, manipulated and possessed. It is a concept built upon the promises of modernity and inextricably linked to its violence: colonialism, ecological devastation, racial capitalism, and the systematic suppression of other ways of inhabiting and processing time.”

“Metabolising Time creates a space for such processes. What unfolds here are not fixed narratives or singular trajectories, but ongoing negotiations with time itself – its sediments, its fractures, its rhythms and its potential new compositions.”

--- Alexander Burenkov, Angelique Spaninks, Marijn Bril and Rawad Baaklini, curatorial statement

Photo credit: Hanneke Wetzer.

Ujazdowski Castle CCA: IF/THEN

“How can we tell stories today? Narratives no longer unfold linearly – they branch, fragment, and mislead. The group exhibition IF/THEN at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art examines the conditionality of the linguistic rules from which stories are constructed in the age of algorithms, games, and digital culture.”

“IF/THEN shows that even the smallest decision – a glance, a step, a pause – can redirect the story onto another path. Many of the works celebrate breakdowns – glitches, jams, and errors – treated not as failures but as methods that open cracks through which new meanings slip, creating moments in which the story unexpectedly turns in another direction. These carriers of discord draw attention to the politics of narrative: who has the right to tell the story, who is inscribed within it, and what remains unsaid.”

--- Sara Szostak and Marta Grytczuk, curatorial statement

Photo credit: Jakub Owczarek.

Lagrange Point

“By invoking the Lagrange Point as both metaphor and method, the exhibition establishes a counterpoint to dominant modes of inquiry. Here, balance is not stasis but a state of potential—an opening for thought, for contact, and for the speculative reimagining of what intelligence, presence, and relation might mean in a universe where we are not alone”

--- Ninth Planet, curatorial statement

A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technology

A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies (TMMT) is a project about human’s relationship with time as technology.

TMMT presents a body of digital and physical work by Wendi Yan that investigates the construction of historicity and technological narratives. The centerpiece of the show is Tale of the Mammoth Goddess, a short animation film about a resurrected mammoth who escaped from the Siberian tundra and hides in a coal mine. While the resurrected mammoth serves as a symbol of a transgression of a natural timeline and a biotechnical object at once prehistoric and futuristic, the rest of the gallery features paintings, prints and sculptures about frozen life, artificial dreams, anachronistic technologies, organic laboratory, and mundane mythologies.

The show draws inspiration from radical museum projects and historiographical fiction, utilizing the language of museum as a personal practice of engaging with knowledge production and embodied cognition. Traversing between fiction and facts, TMMT stares into historicity and questions the linearity of technologies.

TMMT was Wendi Yan’s first solo show, as well as her undergrad thesis show for her art minor at Princeton University.

Press
Coeval Magazine (2023.7)
Next Nature Network (2024.3)
Networked Worlds (2024.3)

Documentation website
A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies

Support by
Sam Hutton Fund for the Arts, Princeton University
Interact Residency
Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition

Advisor: Tim Szetela
Additional advising: BJ Perlmutt, Amy Yao, Pam Lins
Installation assistance: Joe Arnold
Sculpture assistance: Ash Albeser, Michelle Zatta, Nick Sharpe

Works Included

Artverse: To Make a World of Sediment and Sky with Camilla Alberti