Anna Bochkova, Linda Lach

handle with care

7.3.-5.4.2025

Opening: 7.3.2025 5-9pm

As Rosi Braidotti wrote, human has become a question mark – a question mark that cannot accept its point-like existence. What remains is the task of redefining our symbionts’ tenderness and searching for intimacy with the inorganic influences that have already infiltrated us. The era of the exclamation–mark–humans is over; it’s replaced by the technology-infused one, which will either grow back into the cycle of artificial nature or rupture as a weed from its ecosystem.

The duo exhibition of Linda Lach and Anna Bochkova primarily seeks the non-human, not the distant alien, but the ever-present cosmic Other. In a liminal realm ruled by binary codes – where information is reduced to 1s and 0s – the exhibited works suggest a more rhizomatic space of potential futures. They imply a knowable presence of otherworldly and technological forces with which we are implicitly interconnected. The idea of one perfect utopia fragments into a multitude of micro-narratives, outside of time and civilization, no longer providing a stable foundation for biophysical organicism. The exhibition serves as a line of flight from a technological singularity; the artworks are mementos that evoke a forthcoming era where biological evolution is secondary, replaced by hybridization.

Linda Lach’s works are construction sites, where it is undecided whether we are seeing sacred remnants or the initial phases of an unborn generation. These abandoned landscapes not only mark decay but also serve as potential spaces for regeneration. The soil cracks, where life persists beyond human intervention, offering a shelter for us to meditate and hide. Technology becomes defamiliarized; its surface is deprived of touch and longs for physical contact. Intimacy becomes dislocated, shattered into shards that reflect mortality like a prism. Lach’s pneumatic installation represents a liminal space where organic and inorganic can privately, and safely oscillate. The molecules of the breast milk we have absorbed are penetrating our cells as circulating tears of nourishment and dependency. 

These tears trickle down and melt the surface of Anna Bochkova’s residential paperwork into papier-mâché sculptures and frames. The fragile, skeleton-like structures are unsuitable for creating territorializing surfaces and exempting totalitarian power; the material represents the potential to form new fictional worlds. The revealed mythological milieu is in dialogue with Russian Cosmism and Eastern European perspectives on space – her speculative realities decolonize the myth-fiction that conditions cultural imagination. Just as gases expand and fill available space due to the constant motion of their particles, Bochkova allows the unconfined intimacy of the Other to expand between matter. In her work, vulnerability presents itself as ametaphysical model of care of/ and for the ethereal.

Lach and Bochkova’s works merge translucent layers of inter-sensitive atmospheres. The self-sustaining systems resist opacity, gently examine the tools of a perfect utopia that could easily exploit immortal bodies, and dilute the black-and-white corporeal certainty into different shades of gray.

Press release by Aurola Gyorfy