🏛️Schinkel Pavillon
🖼️Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
🕐 2024.6.7-2024.9.1

📍 Oberwallstraße 32, 10117 Berlin, Germany

This exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon Gallery is a large-scale installation by Ivana Basic. Ivana, an artist from Lanslav Belgrade, deeply explores the physical and metaphysical boundaries of humanity. Ivana Ba? IC's (born 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia) first institutional solo exhibition "Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics" was held at Schinkel Pavillon. The title of the exhibition means the soul travels through different bodies, and it features sculptures, videos, paintings and a large pneumatic installation.

Inspired by her experiences during childhood wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bajic's work explores intergenerational trauma, posthuman feminism, and the quest for immortality. Her humanoid sculptures are weak but powerful, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a seven-metre-wide installation in which small metal hammers gradually break the Alabaster stone, echoing the rhythm of the artist's breathing, symbolizing "Pneuma" - "breath" and "soul." The exhibition also features sculptures from other stages of metamorphosis and paintings that resemble wombs, fog and cellular life. Each sculpture combines materials such as wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel and Arabaster, presenting a contrast of softness and violence that eventually turns to dust.


The sculptures in the lobby on the ground floor are reminiscent of insect-like bodies as well as sheep-like liquids, suggesting the raw power of underground and unseen things. A manti-like chimera guards the passageway and was seen in ancient Egypt as an oracle and a guide to eternal life. Starting from the back room of the exhibition hall on the zero floor, the painting is in the form of an oval and a uterus. Dissolved paint and paper twisted by moisture evoke nebulae, birth and the beginning of life. In the adjacent hall, the characters fall into a state of transition, wandering between forms.

The 1st floor gallery is the centerpiece, inspired by 17th century depictions of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Pneuma Hammer will pound at the hour in the rhythm of the artist's breath, Pneuma, meaning breath, spirit, soul.

The altar-like central work in the upper octagonal room is inspired by the 17th-century depiction of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is a large-scale installation in motion: the stone core of the sculpture is gradually shattered into dust.

In each sculpture, Basic combines different substances into a code of materials that runs through his entire artistic practice. The glass points to shape its breath; Wax points to malleable, ephemeral flesh -- paraffin comes from petroleum; From fossils and the soil to which the body will eventually return; Stones are reminiscent of matter under pressure.

This is probably the most special and impressive exhibition I have seen in Berlin this year. There are not many installations on display but they are enough to make people stand for a long time, to see where their lives are going, how their ecology works.

In Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics, the process of disintegration is conceived not as a loss, but as a moment with radical potential-the transition from human to non-human; From deproic acid to celestial bodies; Form is bound to infinity.

Bajic's works let me feel the pain and growth of women's body and mind, full of tension and deep impression. The feeling of expansion overflows the sculpture. It is recommended that you come to see the exhibition of Schinkel Pavillon, and it is also suitable for those who will wear and match to punch in ~