Solo show by Lena Becerra at HAIR ARI
514 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, Australia.
Follicle refers to both the ovarian secretory gland—a cavity or sac—and a dry fruit derived from a single carpel, which opens on one side only to release its seeds.
Mouth like follicles withhold or carry an unnervingly relatable nature, introducing a visceral, synesthetic mirroring experience. Here, we reflect on other organic entities as they reflect on us -creating a continuous loop of unsettling kinship.
At the centre of this installation, a tension emerges between hard, cold steel cartilage and fluid, pulsating motion. Peristaltic pumps, mimicking the process of peristalsis—used in biological systems such as the gastrointestinal tract—create an artificial lifelike rhythm. Stringed tubing metastasizes like arteries across the exhibition space, a hybrid circulatory system carrying both physical and metaphorical nutrients.
Challenging traditional research methods that brutally dissect and structurally archive matter to align with dominant Eurocentric colonial knowledge structures, this work offers an alternative perspective, reframing dismemberment as both generative and gestational.
Here, as the body appears dismembered rather than dissected, each fragment is held by peripheral devices as though they continue their life cycle in isolation. This fragmentation resonates as a fractal experience of being, where each part recapitulates the whole, mirroring the infinite branching structures of existence. The concept of fractal capillarity extends this idea, suggesting a networked fluidity that transcends individual boundaries, linking disparate elements in an intricate and recursive flow.
Unfolding like a chart, unconscious associations draw information from the unknown, evoking a collective unconscious that plays with uncanny kinships. These connections blur the lines between organism and mechanism, life and death, known and ethereal.
Prosthetic surfaces penetrate soft organic and synthetic flesh, creating a hybrid, living membrane.
Soft and hard, fictional and speculative, the morphologies used in this installation carry information which is ancestral and migratory. Here, the artist explores from her own latin diaspora perspective relationships and connections of inherited source tracing symbiotic patterns and textures across the global south.
In this feral and speculative exploration of non-human entities, hybrid ecosystems gestate otherworldly phenomena. The installation invites us to envision a more fluid, circular and relational existence—where human and non-human forms coalesce, creating spaces for kinships yet to be imagined.
17 January - 9 February 2025
