This form of resistance allows a new language to develop.
ll
lossy life
7.03 - 5.04.2025
HANDLE WITH CARE
WITH ANNA BOCHKOVA
EIGEN + ART LAB
PRESS RELEASE
Shelly Atom
Isolation, the act of physically or mentally separating ourselves from the external world,
is a type of technology. It allows us to achieve a variety of goals, many of them of obvious
importance and value: we need it to think, feel, heal and avoid overstimulation. Many
actions which we consider emblematic of humanity happen in personal reflective seclusion.
It can be employed to confirm and strengthen our humanity, but also to abstract it away
to the point of non-existence. The new phenomenon of corporal isolation, currently sold
as “longevity” or “aging research” in Silicon Valley, moves the border of the external world
to the boundary between our minds and bodies. Obsessed with metric performance
and rational superiority, it never asks how we feel, because it does away with the concept
of “subjective sensation” exchanging it for “objective measurement”. Under the guise of this
death-defying enlightenment, we are being sold alienation from our own bodies.
If we give up on the act of subjective feeling, what devices are we left with to assert whether
we are in danger? Shelly Atom attempts to stand ground under this philosophical siege
and consider the act of isolation with all its political implications.
mutex thread 1
Mutex thread series sculptures serve the role of protectors, closely observing the mechanisms
and practices of survival in safety-critical hostile environments, such as complex multifaceted
realities of contemporary social seclusion. They heavily draw from the medical sector in their
botanical shapes by utilizing surgical tools abstracted away from their technical functions.
Formally mutexes are responsible for coordinating access to shared resources, or enforcing
temporary ownership. This mechanism creates an illusion of commonality, hiding unrelenting
mechanisms of temporal property. I interpret waiting in this state of simple lock as a form
of resistance. Sculptures from the Mutex thread series act as gatekeepers, an inevitable result
to previous isolation. This act requires fragmentation of experienced reality into the internal
and external, to optimize protection of the former from the latter. The only being capable
of controlling this separation, is the one enforcing this division. Paradoxically, this brutal
gesture is necessary to get a sensation of safety. Reconstructive processes require vulnerability
and can appear only when keepers allow for crises beyond their control.
Mutex thread series ponders the ability to survive in our current environment. In a selfreflective
gesture it asserts that only brutal temporary locks can save it from peril. In a final
desperate attempt to persevere, it starts overlapping medical elements, which results in
overwriting layers of something previously familiar into an unnamed and alien form of life.
Depicting “body” without actual body.
Mutex thread 2
Explicitly shared socket