SOFT LIQUIDS, HARD SHELLS

What happens if two streams of consciousness originate in similar thoughts but wander into different timelines? When artificial prospects of the things to come become either timeless relics or AI-powered generative landscapes? Traversing between Davide Allieri’s hauntological objects and Susi Gelb’s spiral interventions, SOFT LIQUIDS, HARD SHELLS, curated by Livia Klein, presents a juxtaposition of artistic strategies focusing on hypothetical future projections. The works within the exhibition inject an eerie feeling and reflect the question of a lost nostalgia into an ongoing stream of productive consciousness. In Susi Gelb's artistic practice, associative vortices, and immersive imagery manifest, conjuring an alternative reality through imposing cloudscapes and swirls of water. The boundaries between nature and technology, the organic and the artificial, dissolve in the works, ultimately vanishing entirely. Where does the demarcation between control and chance lie? How might algorithms, randomness, entropy, and the material agency forge new environments that possess a life of their own? Programs, materials and new technologies are run and tested; viruses checked with a constant awareness of the external context. Davide Allieri's work unfolds immersive spatial environments where the linear flow of time hesitates, initiating a contemplation on the fringes of temporal continuity. Within these evocative landscapes, characterised by a post-apocalyptic ambiance replete with cellular motifs, pod-like structures, and enigmatic zones, the artist's multidisciplinary practice of drawing, sculpture, and installation converges—serving as a conduit to apocalyptic visions, speculative fiction narratives, and architectural constructs evocative of brutalist aesthetics and fortified bunkers. Do these drawings offer architectural blueprints for protective architectures, or do they serve as archival testaments to a world in the throes of decay and collapse? This dialectic of uncertainty not only challenges conventional narratives of time but also reframes our understanding of relics, transmuting them into foretells of a future lost. Within SOFT LIQUIDS, HARD SHELLS, a digital sea of pixels merges into an unescapable draft dragging the viewer into a surreal vision of endless generation only to be discharged back into a loose interpretation of the natural. Stirred like a potion the endlessly moving images by Gelb shape a steadily increasing contrast to the seemingly frozen analogue drawings of Allieri’s shapes, questioning the possible productivities of futures and engaging a discourse between the things to come and the possible futures we anticipate.