UNICA (Blaise Kirschner, 2022)
HD, 36min, sound
UNICA refers to the writer and artist Unica Zürn (1916 - 1970), whose illustrated text The House of Illnesses (1958) figures her body and her institutionalisation as one formation. Rethinking contemporary forms of immersion in simulated worlds through Zürn’s body-building, UNICA sets in motion overlapping references to post-apocalyptic computer games, drawings, and dreams. The latent presence of an unnamed catastrophe is repeatedly evoked by the protagonists, an artist and a performer, who move between an atelier, a motion-capture studio and a forested hill on the outskirts of Berlin made from the debris of Second World War ruins. By merging computational with quasi-archaeological procedures, UNICA calls attention to the artificial naturalisation of historical and ongoing violence, and the conditions of possibility for its decoding and disruption.
UNICA exhibition at Fluentum, Berlin, 2022
UNICA - Illiberal Lives exhibition booklet with a text by Anselm Franke, 2023
