ACUD GALLERY

Iron Stream is a performative installation that examines the blood industry as an opaque capitalist infrastructure where technology, morality, and war intersect. Blood donations are commonly promoted through the moral argument that “blood saves lives”. While the life-saving capacity of blood transfusions is well established, Iron Stream asks a more complicated question: whose lives are saved, and at the cost of which others? The manufacturing of consent for political projects, including in the blood industry, often relies on moral frameworks. Morality bridges the individual and the collective, unmasking a confusing relationship between personal willpower and the capitalist instrumentalization of individual human choice. A necropolitical mechanism is maintained not only through the strategic deployment of moral narratives, but also through the fetishization of technology. Iron Stream evokes autonomous life, and displays the contemporary entanglement of war, the erotic, and the capitalist death drive: a mechanism of increasing efficiency and control. By activating uncanny and sci-fi-inspired technological objects, visually reminiscent of medical machines, Iron Stream exposes the connections between the individual materiality of blood and broader systems of power. It presents a continuous choreography between bodies, fluids, and machines that discloses the vicious management of life and death under capitalism.

Looking for the weight of the in-between, this gathering explores the ritual of the threshold, the broader acts of translation, transfer and dialogue as both a connection and a concealment. The object as an ambiguity. The body as a transducer. A dialogue that exists only in the friction. Departing from thoughts by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, this exhibition starts, continues, repeats, initiates and tests possibilities of exchange, dialogue, transfer and translation in both literal and metaphorical forms. The basic acts of translation between languages, contexts, cultures or media as an act of opening up a dialogue, creating sustaining bonds of kinship, “traversing the desert of meaninglessness.” A group show as such takes the acts of communication in between and out of the assembled contributions, while the works included here also engage with this in a range of formal and conceptual shades in themselves; towards an ever-evolving “projection of a common landscape.” The forms that take shape by filling and reacting to the absent, by challenging and dissolving the clear demarcations of the rigid definition and by thinking about and shaping representations of our entanglements. With the objects acting: from a magic game frozen in agency - laying bare an inscribed texture that both opens up and keeps out - molding around the lacking void of the absent - forming a collaborative gesture tackling the muted grievances and atrocities - weaving the intricate ornament of a memory that recedes into the silhouette of a dissolving collective past - putting in their own gestures as a connector, reflector and a disruptor of the preexisting - not wanting to leave the in-between and enduring in a state of hybridity - creating the possibility of a framed view in which images of the outside and inside meet - slip across one another into a third landscape.