TRANSmutation is a commission for The Busan Biennale 2018, which explored an era of division through the theme Divided We Stand, curated by Cristina Ricupero and Jörg Heiser.
TRANSmutation resume a socio-psychological methodology, initiated in their 2002 within the Transaction project, an elliptical meditation on gender construction through media and the relationship of those constructions to the post-soviet identity. Picking up this tangled theme, installation for Busan biennale, entitled TRANSmutation (2018) is envisioned as an apparatus and media device that projects the landscape of a double agent psyche. Mixing the layers of soviet cult spy films, documentary files of bio-experiments in space, and fiction of human-algae hybridization, TRANSmutation constructs a multilayered, associative and visual narrative, a kind of Pharmakon of double agency.
The work’s psychoanalytical aspect takes the form of the spatial agregate, which might suggest a metaphor for psychological interiority manifested through architecture – in other words, a public psychology more expansive than the individual mind.
Architecture: Indrė Umbrasaitė
Camera: pvz.lt
Archival material: The Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania
Thanks to pvz.lt; Institute of Botany, Lithuania; Lithuanian Museum of Ethnocosmology