ART CITIES: Berlin-Ivana Bašić

Ivana Bašić is a Serbian artist living and working in New York. She specializes in sculpture blending various materials, including wax, glass, stainless steel, alabaster and oil paint as well as immaterial elements such as torque, breath, weight, rigidity and pressure. Her work addresses the vulnerability and transformation of the human form and its matter.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Schinkel Pavillon e.V. Archive

Ivana Bašić presents “Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics”, her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany. Progressing like a rite of passage, the presentation will transform both floors of the Schinkel’s iconic octagon-shaped building into a journey that examines the material and metaphysical bounds of humanity. Debuting more than 20 new pieces, the exhibition weaves together sculptures, drawings, video, and an 23-feet-wide animatronic altarpiece into a surreal journey that contemplates the dissolution of the body and the material world, not as a loss, but as a moment of radical potential. Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place. Approximately human in scale, each of Bašić’s sculptures combines disparate materials—wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster—into a unique symbolic material language consistent across the artist’s practice. Evoking womb fluids, and insectile bodies, the figures are at once violent and tender, suggesting primordial forces of the underground and unseen. Significant objects in the show include a chimeric half-insectile, half-machine sculpture reminiscent of a praying mantis, which in Ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures was seen as an oracle and guide into the afterlife. Another sculpture seems to give birth to itself, pressing its own amniotic-hued glass head through its loins. Two biomechanical figures emerge from either end of an altar-like centerpiece. They’re flesh-coloured folds of skin surrounded by shiny plates of armor—seemingly to protect the soft figures as they blossom and dissolve their human shells. The exhibition title, “Passion of Pneumatics”, refers to the exhibition’s centerpiece, inspired by Italian Renaissance images of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Here, the sun-like rays of the Immaculate Heart are replaced with pneumatic hammers that gradually pound a stone to dust at the sculpture’s core. Using the force of compressed air, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma, “breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings—those powered by the spirit, “the breath of life”, who transcend the material realm. On the ground floor visitors are invited to explore more figures in different states of transformation, accompanied by drawings that evoke womb-like forms, nebulaes and cellular life, as if the sculptures have been birthed within them. In several sculptures, flesh-colored folds of skin are surrounded by shiny plates of bronze armor, seemingly to protect their tender flesh. At once tender and violent, each of Bašić’s hand-made sculptures combine vastly disparate materials — wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster — into figures approximately human in scale, evoking human skin, womb fluids, and insect bodies, all of which are in the process of transformation or dissolution. Fixed to the ceilings and floors, or crawling into the walls, to be protected from the violence of the oncoming storm, the figures in “Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics” gradually shift into a disembodied state, ultimately freeing themselves from their forms, and turning into ethereal dust.

Photo: Ivana Bašić, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics, Installation View Schinkel Pavillon e.V.,Berlin, 2024, Photo: Stefan Korte, Courtesy the artist and Schinkel Pavillon e.V.

Info: Schinkel Pavillon e.V., Oberwallstraße 32, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 7/6-1/9/2024, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.schinkelpavillon.de/