Isabelle Andriessen: DORM

“Chests fall up and down. Particles fow from inside the lungs into the open air. They comingle until pulled again into another chest. Quietly the bodies exchange gasses, heat, moisture. They create their own weather. Currents twist in the air until coming to rest in a pair of lungs, only to be expelled back into the rafters. All this is invisible. Nothing could be seen if there were eyes open to look.” —Becket Flannery

Isabelle Andriessen investigates ways to physically animate inanimate (synthetic) materials in order to provide them with their own metabolism, behavior and agency. Her sculptures are agents inhabiting the liminal space between sculpture and performance, composed of materials that act and evolve, seemingly beyond control and often irreversibly.
On the occasion of the exhibitions DORM (2021) and BUNK (2021), this publication brings together three distinct voices. Sci-fi writer and art critic Mark Von Schlegell contributes a short story in which an engineer is trying to locate a lost AI as a spaceship hurdles of course. In an autonomous photo series photographer Nikola Lamburov reimagines Andriessen's sculptures, capturing their processes in sticky, eerie and surreal landscapes. Through fractals, liquids, vapors and metals, curator Laura McLean-Ferris’s essay traces the state changes that are enacted across Andriessen’s works, and in doing so fnds systems of porous entanglement that fourish in a world without humans.