Dominika Ksel: (SEA)NCE
(SEA)NCE | Meditating on Emergent Seas | Vinyl | Installation Photos | Press Release
IN PERSON:
April 8-May 16, 2021
Opening Reception: April 8, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Sat and Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Meditating on Emergent Seas (Hybrid Event): April 24th, 5-6:30pm Kiran Chandra (Shanghai), Patricia Domínguez (Chile) & Betsy LeFae and Dominika Ksel (Brooklyn)
Please RSVP
Open Source Gallery presents Dominika Ksel’s (SEA)NCE, a site-specific installation. When we shift the lens of how we relate to the “unliving,” an invisible choreography emerges. An electric map, a web of unseen forces, intentions, and possibilities, connects the dots of the living and the dead. Plastics have become the sacred extensions of our lives. Born of compounds from the depth of the Earth and our desires for instant gratification, taking shape in many forms from plastic straws, smartphones, fast fashion, beloved toys. We have become rife in toxicity as these desires now litter every crevice of our planets land, waters and wildlife. Like the gods of old we have grown overwhelmed and angry at the disruption and dis-ease these plastics have expelled upon us.
In (SEA)NCE, Ksel offers a challenge to the dystopia and disaster, a proposal of integration with the spirit of plastics. An embodied listening, shifting us deeper, opening our interrelatedness to include all forms of nature. A cross-species climate therapy. Instead of putting plastics in opposition to the “natural world,” recognize the energetic properties they carry, the force they exude. Embrace, integrate, dissolve. What they are, how they have come to be and acknowledge that they are the extension of our desires. Think of them as an extended family member, reconfigure that toxic uncle into a healthier more positive role. Resolve this relationship by diving into the cosmology and co(dependence) of this distressing and urgent situation by communing with the spirits of plastics in a multi-dimensional session of ecological restoration and healing.
We commune with our ancestors in a variety of rituals across cultures, paying homage, asking for wisdom and support from those who came before us. At times these prayers and meditations take form in symbolic, seemingly lifeless objects embedded with powers such as totems and talismans. Like rocks that can heal our bones, these plastic objects are venerated for their spiritual, life giving capacity and healing properties.
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Dominika Ksel is an interdisciplinary artist investigating unseen forces that inform our physical and immaterial realities. Through community collaboration, sonic sculptures, VR and video, Ksel uses gameplay and interactivity to map power dynamics, research consciousness, embodied cognition and interspecies collaboration. These experiential works draw on speculative fictions, techn0fem1n1sm, erased histories and invisible landscapes investigating how technology and mysticism mediate the perception of self and our interconnected ecologies. Ksel received an MFA from Hunter College. Their work has been shown at the Every Woman Biennial (NY), El Museo del Barrio Biennal (NY), Galleria Liberia (Bogota), Bronx 4th AIM Biennial (NY), 5 Myles Gallery (NY) and Witte de With Contemporary Museum (Rotterdam, NE).
Image: Still from Holotropic Deathwork, holographic video series, 2021
