The exhibition includes a sequence of drawings and intimate, sculptural works that check the bounds of human materiality. Sculptures in wax, white bronze, blown glass, copper and chrome steel reveal biomechanical curves and alabaster cores resembling summary and abject reductions of the physique.
Formed by the artist’s early experiences of violence and brutality in the course of the collapse of her native Yugoslavia, Bašić’s hybrid our bodies ponder metamorphosis as an alternative to bodily flight when there’s nowhere left to retreat or conceal.
The artist references Catherine Malabou’s “Ontology of the Accident”, which posits the transformation into Otherness as the one selection obtainable when bodily flight has develop into not possible.1 Probing the constraints of natural plasticity, the abstracted bodily kinds are imbued with potential, evoking gestures of opening up and blossoming, whereas the fact of what they’re fleeing—battle, technological advances, political instability—lingers darkly within the background.
On the coronary heart of the exhibition lies the Ungrounding sequence, a group of watercolour drawings on paper that function the conceptual and visible point of interest. The elliptical kinds, dissolved pigments, and warping of paper, invoke , womb like surroundings, cyclical pictures of nebulae, mobile life, changing into and unbecoming “mud to mud.” For Bašić, this type of quantum return is an optimistic, generative area—a reacquaintance with probably the most basal and indivisible elements of existence.
The Ungrounding sequence acts as a blueprint for the formation of the physique and the being and its ethereal origins, explored by way of the sculptural works within the present.
Abstracted sculptures distil the physique to its most important traces, hovering between embodiment and dissolution. On reverse partitions, two kinds resemble insect chrysalises with armour-like bronze shells, in addition to otherworldly wombs caught within the means of opening, blossoming, and birthing. The beams surrounding the sculptures are security devices often known as “Grounding rods”—gadgets which are used as pathways for magnetic and electrical forces to soundly connect with Earth. The round group of those rods concurrently evokes the gesture of pinning a butterfly and mimics the rays of ardour and transformation in mystical depictions of the Sacred Coronary heart.
Hypostasis, a floor-based sculpture, explores life’s ephemeral nature, encapsulated in translucent glass eggs stuffed with mud and the artist’s breath. These kinds, hermetically sealed and awaiting to be hatched, embody the brutality and potential of life forces. In Bašić’s Fantasy vanishes in flesh (2025), ornate metal frames, topped with a radiant halo signify an nearly alchemical union of the telluric and celestial, sacred and profane, matter and spirit. The work’s ethereal aspirations, manifested in its meticulous metalwork and symmetrical design, discover their earthly counterpoint within the natural tendrils that descend like silver roots or spectral limbs, whereas their central wax portray seems to seize a spirit suspended within the liminal area between corporeal and divine states. Breath seeps by way of her tightly closed mouth | Place II: Swelling #2 contemplates flights from materiality into different types of existence. This sculpture incorporates a single blown glass entity suspended on a metal armature—pure, transcendental “breath” in commune with the entropic pressures of life and demise.
Bašić’s observe employs a visible language through which every materials symbolically hyperlinks to a conceptual counterpart. This codex is constant throughout the artist’s observe, permitting the viewer to know every art work within the context of Bašić’s better theoretical cosmology. Wax represents temporal components resembling flesh and natural tissue; its origins in petroleum gesture towards the cyclicality of life and decay. Glass, in the meantime, represents the breath that shaped it, and chrome steel the forces of life and demise that act on the physique. Stone is the consolidation of natural life and matter that, below stress, is additional atomized into mud. In her consideration of mud Bašić references thinker Reza Negarestani: “Mud is irreducible. The fundamental object of creation—a components for all times with out life itself.”2These supplies, together with intangible forces like stress, breath, weight, and torque, mix to create a physique of labor that investigates our most urgent ontological fixations: the fragility of the human situation; the breakdown of self and the Different; the reimagination of life and demise; and the hunt for immortality.
at Albion Jeune, London
till April 17, 2025
