'RYXPER1126AE' by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė at Trafó Gallery, Budapest

‘This enclosed container houses something we cannot perceive, a memory to the past or an illusion. It is enclosed here in its image and its form, flattened akin to a 19th century diorama. A camera establishes the way of seeing without permission to full understanding without permission to be inhaled.’

The exhibition of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė invites and isolates the visitors at the same time, leading them into zones of the in-between. In-between the space of the real and that of the online realm, in-between matter and information, nature and its rendered representation, narration and theory, individual and collective experiences. Central to the exhibition is a fragrance, which is a synthetic molecular replica, a volatile memory of the smell collected during one of the previous performances of the artists. The scent together with other elements in the exhibition – such as organic installation, a video generated with artificial intelligence, a sound installation and diverse objects – renders the abandoned gallery space an aberrant, organic but also austere speculative environment.