SHOP
Everything Reminds Me of You
The internal impetus to mutate my personal archive led me to imagine a world that is yet to be and to collaborate with Physarum polycephalum, also known as slime mold, an acellular model organism that holds the interest of the scientific community due to its ability to think and perform complex computations without a brain or a nervous system.
It has now been sent into space to study the direction it will move in. Will it occupy the third dimension by going upwards, or go sideways? If the slime could access another dimension, perhaps I could work with it to explore another dimension of my archive.
By collaborating with the non-human, I aim to question what we ‘know’ about intelligence and assert the position of my mother, my maternal grandmother, and the slime mold as thinkers, innovators, everyday rebels, and aliens who constructed a new world and imagined new ways of being. My hope with the work is to establish a flat ontology to expand and contribute to the creation of this proposed world.
Here, all of us, the slime mold, the algae, the fungus that infiltrated our environment, my mother, her mother, and I, are as unruly as we can be. This process extended my role to that of a caregiver of a living photograph. Although its texture feels like it is embedded into the image, it is not. It moves and glides over the image, but does nothing to lend to its destruction.
I clean the slime. I feed it.
In doing so, I encounter my alien self through it.
In her work, Kanishka Kanishka, confronts and forms linkages between the themes of techno-optimism, domestic labor, capitalism, and feminism. The artist is drawn to the ubiquitous, mysterious, gendered, ambiguous, and invisible nature of labor. She engages with her personal archive and investigates the elements in her mother’s images, such as the pose, milieu, and other visible objects. Kanishka strives to express the generational effects of her relationship with domestic labor by dismantling the power structures that dominate her personal archive.
In ‘The Oikos of the Earth, the Nomos of the Black Hole’, Antonia Majaca explains: A 1958 book by Hannah Arendt, titled The Human Condition, was highly influential in the consolidation of this new rational Subject of liberal humanism. In this text, Arendt takes up the distinction between handeln (praxis) and herstellen (poiesis) and develops the character of these activities on the basis of the ancient city-state (polis) as it appears in Aristotle’s Politics. Handeln takes place in the public sphere of the polis, while herstellen and arbeiten (work) belong to the sphere of the private economy—the space of unproductive labor, the space of social reproduction, the ancient oikos. The strict separation between the private and public spheres ensures that the material constraints and necessities of organic life are kept out of the public sphere and that the polis can therefore be a meeting place for “free and equal people” to exercise their right to “the political” in a transparent, frictionless space of rationality.
Kanishka proposes to rethink this dissociation and question the production of activity, knowledge, and ordered structure of the polis. Her works when placed together begin to create their own networks and relationships. The artist reflects - If such relationships are explored, can they be revolutionary? If everything under the sun is part of a capitalist factory, do we need to assess the tasks we perform for the love of others and self? As Bertolt Brecht said, “The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.”
These photographs invite us to think past the obvious ecosystems of labor.