'Kiss off life' by Janina Frye at P/////AKT, Amsterdam

Janina Frye’s evolves around the notion of a ‘new materiality’ and is related to theories such as Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology (rejecting mankind as the centre of the world and emancipating objects as equals) as well as older or non-western paradigms like animism. Frye takes on this new materiality as a stage where the boundaries between body and object become diffuse and it’s no longer quite clear whether it’s the people designing the objects or that the objects are somehow designing us. Her most recent research, leading up to the exhibition at P/////AKT, involves the materials that are performing as intermediators between the natural and the artificial, moulded and used to closely collaborate, or even merge with the body. While some of these objects and contraptions are meant as actual replacements or extensions of body parts, others are designed to take over more immaterial functions such as movement and air being circulated. They both give freedom and take it away, growing more independent from us than we of them. It’s this ambivalent, in-between stage of affinity and alienation that Frye is addressing, creating a sculptural setting and atmosphere through which these ‘dead’ objects and materials are activated into leading a life of their own. Move back and forth, breath in and out. Do protheses also feel this phantom pain?