UPCOMING
Weird Gnosis
Impakt - online exhibition
Utrecht, The Netherlands
siXren (verbum medicinae)
screening
As new media technologies appear increasingly indistinguishable from magic, the Internet is becoming a forum for the struggle between the left-hand and right-hand paths of esoteric revelation and weird mediation. From witchcraft to psychedelia, this exhibition draws together artworks on the theme of weirdly mediated modes of knowing the beyond from within.
Although psychedelia is often associated with a 60's "flower power" aesthetic, powerful mind altering substances have been imagined differently in different places and times—including in dark and disturbing forms, as for example with the CIA’s “MKUltra” mind control experiments. In spite of this radical contingency, what connects these various experiments is that they are all deeply weird. These drugs, like the technologies of Silicon Valley, can be conceptualized as both a cure and poison—what the ancients called a "pharmakon". Neither good nor bad, they are also far from neutral.
As we enter the 2020’s, Silicon Valley and biotech are turning psychedelic drugs into big business. For all its therapeutic potential, this renaissance in psychedelic research threatens, however, to eclipse the weirdly mystical dimensions of underground psychedelic cultic milieus, whose secret history reaches back to antiquity. As media technologies are fundamentally changing how we encounter each other, the world and ourselves, what we need are visions of how we would like to be mediated differently.
United by a long and brutal history of oppression these technologies of the self have long been used to access the divine through self-knowledge, which the ancients referred to as "gnosis". Centered around an online exhibition of video and performance art, Weird Gnosis curates a dialogue with both artists and thinkers whose practices engage with these paradoxes of revelatory and radical weirdness.
The Polymorphs project is an interdisciplinary research focussed on the production of a series of immersive audio/video journeys. In this project, I will translate my live ritual performances into a series of audio journeys on a dedicated online web-platform; Polymorphs. The audio journeys are accompanied by cinematic scenes, texts, and other research material, in a unique collaboration with musician Kris Vango and filmmakers Nvisible.studio.
The project takes inspiration from Animal Polymorphism:
“Polymorphism in biology is related to biodiversity, genetic variation, and adaptation. Polymorphism usually functions to retain a variety of forms, and results from evolutionary processes.”
The project Polymorphs focuses especially on a new topic of research - human biology - inspired by the fact that body biology is currently a main focal point of all our evolutionary and existential concerns. Contemporary nano-/bio-/and pharma- technology foremostly focusses on future survival via the reengineering of the human body, with underlying transhumanist ideals of transcendence. With Polymorphs, I create a spiritual reflection on the emergence of ideologies and technologies pertaining to human embodiment. The notion of Animal Polymorphism especially helps me speculate a future of awakening into human metamorphic animality, which I see as a possible solution to survive the shift into post-anthropocene. In other words: we need to become (more) animal.
ONGOING
The Spell for melatonin secretion is an outcome/contribution for Mary Maggic workshop on Hacking the molecular, Second Nature Lab, 2021
This is a spell for reclaiming the pineal gland function, a small endocrine gland in the brain, which produces the hormone melatonin*.
Due to pollution, noise and general toxicity, pineal gland calcifies and lays dormant, which prevents melatonin secretion that is linked with consciousness expansion and communication with the non-human world. This spell aims to decalcify our pineal gland, awaken it, and reclaim natural melatonin levels to prime the body on the molecular level for clairvoyant and spiritual experiences in the post-anthropocene age.
FORMAT International Photography Festival - exhibition within a purpose-built 3D multiplayer virtual gallery space.
Showing my work Medicinal words meditation - Initiation into conscious transformation.
For the past year I've been participating in the The Preserving Machine, a research group focusing on emergent computational, three-dimensional imagery through practice-based and theoretical research. This group perceives the 3d image as something that sits uneasily in relation to the ontological framework of previous understandings of photography. Our research explores the aesthetic and epistemological issues related to post-photographic imagery, with transdisciplinary research inquiries. As a group from a diverse range of approaches: curating, research, art practice, we offer multiple perspectives to navigate and critically examine these spatially complex, illusory and uncontainable forms.
Virtual Cocoons (a collaborative curatorial project between Specter and Theo Ellison) is an online exhibition responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and showcases lockdown-related coping mechanisms by artists in the online realm.
Virtual Cocoons was conceived during the initial worldwide lockdown and reflects on methods of coping, the idiosyncrasies of living under lockdown, and our gradual emergence coming out of it. Coping, here, is used in the widest sense of the word in how we deal with rapid shifts in circumstance that seem out of our control, however large or small those shifts may be.
Architectural Intelligence and Multiple Ecologies
Lecture by prof. Thomas Mical, University of Silesia in Katowice, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Culture Studies, Poland - discourse with Takaharu Tezuka, Agnes Momirski, curated by dr Małgorzata Kądziela/PhD
December 202
Full-lenght films and videos from 2017-2020 aquired by SCCA DIVA online digital archive: VALA film, VALA two-channel video, siXren (verbum medicinae), NO4 (SONAR).
RECENT
Fold London
Curated by Charlotte Clark
siXren WORKSHOP - Bio-hacking with language 1.9.2020 - streamed on IG live
“Digital Retreat” is a 1 month takeover from artist/curator Charlie Clark.
This takeover platforms digital artists and collectives who create spaces where we can find new means of leisure and creativity, extending our worlds through the meta-realities that have been built in the virtual.
The Polymorphic ritual is a multi-sensory experience, focused on topics of metamorphosis, transformation, and mutation in relation to human consciousness and (technological) embodiment in times of crisis.
The Polymorphic ritual marries rituality with future mindedness, bringing forth the awareness of human transience - in body and spirit. The ritual is an interactive experience, where participants are called to deep listening and participation in ritual methods. With breathwork, guided visualization, and rhythm, we somatically and emotionally call forth a desired wholesome and integrated future where our polymorphic nature becomes apparent.
Ritual is a collaborative project between artist Agnes Momirski, movement artists Tatiana Kocmur and Liza Simenc, sound artist Marko Batista, and costume designer Brina Vidic.
siXren (verbum medicinae)
Ritual performance
Festival Racka
Celje, Slovenia
25.9.2020
Athens Digital Arts Festival
Special Screening - siXren (verbum medicinae)
July 2020
Svicarija
Residency and solo exhibition
MLGC Ljubljana
International center for graphic arts
January/February 2020
More about Svicarija here
siXren project is inspired by models of ancient knowledge as healing methods in the coming era of posthumanity. Our Earth-born bodies are affected by the sonic and vibrational properties of our environments. Sound and voice have profound effects on body biology, brain chemistry and sensory clarity. The project explores the primordial power of utterance, word and sound to affect our animal senses and their psychoacoustic effects, while promoting ritual and ceremonial sensibility in the matrix of contemporary sonic experiences.
siXren is a hybrid multimedia ritual experience, where the ancient verbal and sound formulas are abstracted over contemporary rhythmic aesthetics of electronic noise sonic territories. Creating imaginary sonic territories between digital and animate, pre-modern and hyper-modern, holding space for altered states of mind, the supersensible, supernatural, more-than-human worlds in our techno-ecology.
Interviews 2020
Lente Kabinet festival
Amsterdam
Ritual music performance
May 2020 - POSTPONED TO 2021
Program here
is a multidimensional hibrid sonic consciousness, and a project umbrella by Agnes Momirski for sound and music collaborations. Fusing ritual and meditative patterns and EDM genres, medicinal verbal formulas and rhythm, opening a fantasy space for healing.
UCL Digital anthropology
London
Specter, panel discussion
6.3.2020
The Vala project experiments with the linguistic and vocal registers of female voices that are used in (wellness) interfaces. Vala is a wellness AI, whose androgenous instructional voice gradually becomes poetic, sensual and female. The name Vala comes from Nordic mythology, where she is the female shaman, and from Blake’s mythological poetry, where she’s the representation of nature. Vala shows a path towards a future, representing a new harmony between the virtual and physical, digital and analogue, reason and intuition, man and nature.
Project is supported by Mondriaan fonds, The Netherlands, and Ministry of Culture, Slovenia
Zhōuwéi Network: Embodied Ambitopias
Magic Circle
Immersive online exhibition, coming soon
Zhōuwéi Network is a research umbrella studying the design of affective undertones in different near-future societies by forward-engineering them from a critical perspective. Following a year-long process of expert consults, curation and experimentation, the fiction series Embodied Ambitopias prototypes windows into three speculative worlds driven by different value paradigms: Dolphin Waves (New York City), a corporate playbour & wellness hub; Dragonfly (Netherlands), a technocratic state focusing on safety and harmony; and Project Gecko (multiple locations), a network of decentralised liquid democracies founded on inner healing through movement. Embodied Ambitopias will be released online on https://zhouwei.network/ as well as a series of physical exhibitions including MAMA (Rotterdam) and Jan van Eyck (Maastricht).