Ivana Bašić. Fantasy vanishes in flesh

In Fantasy vanishes in flesh, Ivana Bašić examines the material and metaphysical bounds of humanity. Charged by her early experiences of war, violence, and brutality during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia, the artist employs a posthumanist lens to explore the ways in which pressure and destruction transform not only the body but also subjectivity — both individual and collective.

Bašić's practice employs a visual language in which each material symbolically links to a conceptual counterpart. This material codex is consistent throughout the artist's body of work, allowing the viewer to understand each piece within Bašić's broader theoretical cosmology.

Glass speaks to the breath that formed it. Wax connotes malleable, impermanent flesh — paraffin wax derives from petroleum, from the fossils and soil to which the body will ultimately return. Bronze suggests armor, the protective strategies of an organism. Stainless steel evokes the violence of inevitable forces acting upon the body. Stone represents the consolidation of organic life and matter that, under pressure, atomizes into dust.

These materials, along with intangible forces like pressure, breath, weight, and torque, combine to create a body of work that investigates our most profound ontological fixations: the fragility of the human condition; the breakdown of self and the Other; the reimagination of life and death; and the quest for immortality.

The exhibition begins with drawings from which elliptical, womb-like forms emerge. The dissolved pigments and paper warped from moisture evoke nebulae, birth, and the beginnings of life. Throughout the exhibition figures are caught in states of transformation, hovering between forms. Evoking insectile bodies and amniotic fluids, the sculptures suggest primordial forces of the underground and unseen. In the center of the exhibition is a chimeric figure resembling a praying mantis — considered in ancient Egypt an oracle and guide into eternal life.

In the last room a singular genderless being, is suspended above the heads of the viewers as if arrested in ascendance. The piece captures a figure in an impossible pose, simultaneously undergoing processes of creation and dissolution. Seen from the back, the figure is seemingly giving birth to itself, pressing its own amniotic-hued glass head through its loins. Seen from the front, a slit on the figure's back reveals the sculpture's core, as if the figure is caught in a process of shedding its body.... read the rest of the article»