Human-made materials now outweigh all living biomass on Earth. This milestone steers us towards reconsidering the obediency of materials against the suggestion of matter with open-ended evolution.
Experience the hidden forces of matter through the inner-animated landscape of Thixocymatics, a Black Smoking Mirror, and a singing vagina in Nina and the Robots. In collaboration with LIMA, the program will be supplemented by a screening of Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Talking about Similarity.
Trigger Warning: the program contains nudity and extreme body art
Thixocymatics is a kinetic sculpture that explores the fragile threshold between order and collapse. Using tools from the world of construction—specifically concrete formwork—the artist created an instrument that carefully manipulates a block of thixotropic calcium. Rather than producing stable patterns, the material resists predictability. It slowly shifts, continuously reshaping itself into an evolving, unstable landscape. The work embodies a dialogue with material agency, where control gives way to emergence, and structure yields to fluid transformation.
Aldo Brinkhoff works with an intuitive approach to chemistry to find, isolate and strengthen natural phenomena. Attracted to the uncontrollable nature of these processes, he navigates through their complexity and emergent morphology.
Nina and the Robots is an opera that stages the encounter between two bodies: a human and a soft robot driven by compressed air. Filmed as a live performance in two long takes, the piece converges into a breath-heavy face-off where the singing merges with the robot’s pump (driving both the score and movement) in a moment of technological teleonanism.
Cindy Coutant is a visual artist and researcher based in Geneva (CH). Her work explores the living’s desire to connect with beings and things, as well as the co-evolution between species and techno-species. Her installations, films, and augmented readings dismantle western high-tech narratives, introducing a missing imaginary where technology appears as non-instrumental, slimy, erotic, and indefinite.
Black Smoking Mirror is a performance about resistance, friction and obstruction of the canvas by laser engraving surrounded by electronic sound.
Gert-Jan Prins focuses on the sonic and musical qualities of electronic noise and investigates its relationship with the visual. His works includes live performances, sound-installations, compositions, electronic circuits, and collaborations with composers, musicians and visual artists.
Martijn van Boven combines the techniques and possibilities of modern image processing and creation within the context of expanded cinema and early computer generated films.
Talking about Similarity is a performance about self-imposed silence, which took place in Amsterdam, on November 30th, 1976.
From 1976 to 1988, Ulay collaborated with Marina Abramović, forming one of the most celebrated artistic partnerships of the 20th century. Their intensely symbiotic relationship, both personal and artistic, led to groundbreaking performance works that pushed the limits of physical and psychological endurance.
About the curators
Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch have been working in tandem since 1998 creating multi-sensory installations and performances prodding the slippery origins of the physical world. The duo’s artworks have emerged through unorthodox collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), RySQ (Rydberg Atom Quantum Simulator), and Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft).
This event is presented by iii with financial support from Creative Industries Fund NL and The Municipality of The Hague.
