LUCA

Anastasia Komar LUCA 04.23—06.01.2025 Management is pleased to present LUCA, an installation by Anastasia Komar that contemplates the future of humanity through the prism of its primordial past, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Komar created an installation in the gallery space that hints at the synthesis of organic and non-organic lifeforms, engaging our senses of sight, scent, and sound. The soundtrack for the show was written and composed by Kamron Saniee in collaboration with the artist. A short text by Maya Kotomori accompanies the exhibition. ——— A voice—calm, and measured. I am not first, but only. Mother and father to all that crawl, that breathe, that can reach and recoil. In your marrow, where it narrows. Between me and you, lattice-like and shifting. Organelles free-based in the ichor of potential. The cask of merging, consuming, becoming, is here. The split and spread of tendrils not yet come to flesh, an infinite presence sprouting in brilliant technicolor. Between potential and reality. Coated in a cipher of biological intent. It wraps itself in damask, and yearns, hardening in shells made of acetate. A whisper charged pulses, an ancient incantation woven from the language of ions and gradients, a hymn of hydrogen and heat. I am the ghost of vents long cooled, the ember of oceans still boiling. Fish have walked out of me. I am the channel that bridges time, the sinew between future’s past and past’s future. You were never alone. You were always me. Lines emerge from the void, glowing filaments that tangle and weave into fractal patterns. These are cells, or not cells, but the idea of cells—their earliest echoes, when life was a thought not yet spoken. From the central chamber, a translucent mass writhes and divides, a digital rendering of genesis itself. Not a reconstruction of history, but a suggestion, a dream of what might have been before there was anything else to remember. I am not first, but only. Mother and father to all that crawl, that breathe, that can reach and recoil. In your marrow, where it narrows. Between me and you, lattice-like and shifting. Organelles free-based in the ichor of potential. The cask of merging, consuming, becoming, is here. The split and spread of tendrils not yet come to flesh, an infinite presence sprouting in brilliant color. It wraps itself in damask, and it yearns, hardening in shells made of acetate. Its placenta unfurls into space, a web of sensory tendrils reaching, translating the shifting currents of its environment, a transmission node pulsing with silent messages. It is not inert. It sings its song I know in my cells, searches for echoes in the void—others like itself, or at least the promise of their existence. In my womb, life replays its first refrain. To be. To become. To reach. To return. Bathed in the petrichor of an electrochemical gradient, folded into every lungful of air, LUCA endures. — Maya Kotomori ——— Anastasia Komar (b. 1986 in Kaliningrad, USSR. Lives and works in New York) received an MA in Architecture and Environmental Design from the Moscow Institute of Architecture. Solo exhibitions include Hosts at Management, New York; ex-vivo at Bank, Shanghai; and von Neumann’s Dream at Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include To Bloom at The Page, Seoul; Cell Struggles at Foundry, Seoul; Weirding Worlds at Podium, Hong Kong; Fever Dream at Swivel Gallery, New York; Holding at Kristen Lorello & Van Doren Waxter, New York; Poetics of Falsification at Harper’s, East Hampton; America Runs at Dunkunsthalle, New York; Contemporary Practices at the gallery of the School of Visual Arts, New York; Over the Structures at the CICA Museum, South Korea, and has executed several site-specific projects in New York and California. Komar’s work has been published in The Financial Times, The Art Newspaper, Vogue Scandinavia, Surface Mag, BOMB Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Artsy, Designboom, and many other publications. Her work is included in the START Museum, Shanghai, and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.