Welcome to “Thresholds” - our new installation, conceived specially for the Zachęta spaces. Take your time moving around the soft surfaces while watching and listening to the mechanical breathing of kinetic sculptures. This installation explores membranes both as biological and as political borders. Membrane is a border of difference. It is both porous, allowing for interactions between and beyond the limits of bodies. And it is viscous - resistant to changing form and this way preventing things to be swept into some amorphous undifferentiated mass. Like all borders, they are changing, elastic and being constantly tested and erased in time. Membranes filter what they identify as foreign matter to enter the body that they shield and envelope, thus often language coming from biology is used by political field to talk about the importance of border control. Like immunity, it is constantly intertwined in political and biological discourses. But does membrane always remember what is foreign and how it identifies what is foreign? Is it because it is something yet unfamiliar to it? Membrane can be seen as a threshold, a site where the interior and exterior meet, or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, it is pulsating space - where the inside and outside keep intermixing.

In this installation, the elastic surfaces of textile and silicone membranes are pulsating due to a rhythmic pressure made by technological bodies. This interaction could be seen as a more intimate yearning for touch, of gentle connection between surfaces. Yet if we look into it from a political perspective, it gains darker tones: the warmly glowing glass objects might appear as unknown bodies surveilled by a an eye of a thermocamera, their fragile figures locked in a perpetual motion between a mechanical push and a soft, but firm push-back by the elastic membrane. The pulsating breathing of the technological bodies are accompanied by a low drone-like sound, generated by a steam-pipe instrument, and orange-red glow coming from a room in the back of the installation. Yet unknown force is seeping into the main space by immaterial, but sensible waves of light and sound.

This installation does not offer you straight forward answers about the role of membranes, but invites you to change your lenses to experience various reading of the show.

Neringa Černiauskaitė