CHIMERA
Lena Kuzmich
(2022)
In their childhood, artist Lena Kuzmich was deathly afraid of snails. These creatures, earthen and wet, became synonymous with the unknown, the instability and changeability of the “natural order”. In CHIMERA, Kuzmich draws from this experience and explores the distance between fear and understanding. Snails, amongst other gynandromorphs, become starting points to examine the queerness of ecology and non-binary life in nature.
In melding digital avatars, dark, reflective surfaces and sculptures of shifting materiality - Kuzmich examines the potential and instability within our notion of “human” as a species. Weaving technology with explorations of the natural world, Kuzmich wrestles with the systems of knowledge (biological and ecological) we use to build boundaries between fluid life forms. How can “we”, in symbiosis with technology, re-enter the category of nature?
Found footage, video essay and sculpture are assembled into playful worlds that question our “scientific” knowledge. Here, conventional wisdom - with which we are dissected and established as separate life forms (dooming queer beings as unnatural) is contested.
How can we function in such systems of alienation? Which cultures appear to counter nature: creating the simultaneous disasters of climate change and the gender binary?
Sound Design by
Leonard Prochazka
Graphic Design by
Winona Hudec
Text with
Lennart Horst
Supported by
Best Austrian Animation Festival
Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien
Sehsaal