Artists

Ivana Bašić

Press release

A storm cuts through the Schinkel Pavillon’s historic building as clouds of dust wander across the first institutional solo exhibition of New York-based artist Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia).

Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presents sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić’s poetic, deeply nuanced material language.

Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.

In the center of the exhibition is a seven-meter-wide, site-specific sculpture that will take up the entire first-floor hall. At the core of this sculpture, between two large lobes of glass, small pneumatic metal hammers are gradually pounding an alabaster stone into dust — merging with the floating clouds of dust already inhabiting the exhibition space. Driven by air-pressure, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma,”breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings — those powered by the “breath of life”, the spirit that transforms beyond the material realm.