2023 | Installation
Composed of a diorama, statuettes, animated video work, and specimens from the museum’s collection, Ship of the Immortals creates a thought space around the concepts of immortality, the dreamstate, transitionality, temporaneity, and travel whose point of departure is a Chinese ritual object known as a root carving, usually a portrayal of a Taoist saint. Here, characters, material use, and production of form can all be described via the concept of transitionality — of existence between nature and culture, human and spirit, worldly and supernatural — with spirits emerging from wood and anthropomorphic beings sporting botanical protheses: characters in a story that poses such questions as How can what was once essential but now passed out of existence be preserved? Can one exist in multiple places at once? and How can death be made an integral part of life? The ship of the Immortals installation takes the artefact of the same name, then offers it up as a 3D scan: not a reproduction, but a reshaping, a changed essence of it, a version raised into another world. Ship of the Immortals links the deep past to the present, leaving the door onto the future open. It is an experiment in how different forms of being — departing, preserving — can fit together. It is a vehicle between worlds about which very little is known. (FRAZON, Zsófia | 2023)
