SUSKA BASTIAN
OF FEELERS AND FURIES
After two group shows, this third edition focuses on the work of artist Suska Bastian, a graduate of Villa Arson who has been based in Nice since joining the Station’s studios. Suska will present a new body of work, developing new techniques, yet retaining the vocabulary and atmosphere so characteristic of her work.
Taking up her research and production process around ambivalent forms, the exhibition Of Feelers and Furies focuses on the defense mechanisms of plants. Natural thorns collected in urban environments are alternately perceived for their cruel physiognomy and their stylistic allure, delicate and elegant; a subtle dissensions that run across the artist’s entire body of work. Through her pieces, Suska Bastian also takes up the vocabulary of ornament, de-forming and re-forming industrial materials by their physical affinities, substituting their functional aspect for decorative motifs that unfold ad infinitum. Suska Bastian constantly reconsiders the boundaries between nature and culture, the tensions and ambivalences that these concepts entail, and encourages us to think once again about the relationship between man and the environment.
Suska Bastian explores matter and form. Her sculptures and installations articulate organic yet human-made registers of envi- ronments. Her work allows the visualities of nature and technology to mix and conflate, emphasising fluidity and interconnec- tivity. Bastian seeks to activate forms of making that call to attention a sense of intimacy with the natural world, speaking of a fundamental inseparability of the human sphere of technology and the organic sphere of nature. Her process of bio-technical hybridisation can thus be characterised as an attempt to unlock access points of empathy for the natural environment.
Originally from Jena, Germany, she studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach and graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2022. She currently lives and works in Nice, France, and is part of the ‘artist-run-space’ La Station. Her first solo exhibition was held in September at Espace Art Concret, as part of the “Écho les Cimes” prize. She also created monumental sculptures for the Audibergue mountain, not far from Grasse. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as Shahin Zarinbal in Berlin, DOC in Paris, COLLECT in Monaco, Villa Arson in Nice, Parc de la Villette in Paris, Centre Culturel Prince Jacques in Beausoleil, MISC in Athens, and the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, among others.
AVEC LE PRECIEUX SOUTIEN DE LA SOGEDA, LA DIRECTION DES AFFAIRES CULTURELLES, LA MONACO ART WEEK ET ART MONTE CARLO.
Graphism: Kathrin Baumgartner
Of Feelers and Furies
The furie does not want to fit in. It questions norms and helps me explore the space in between. I am interested in the gap created by the Western division of culture and nature. Through collecting and transforming natural and industrial materials, I explore the ambivalence and tension that lie within these divisions. I like to mix things up.
Furies, in mythology, represented cosmic justice and inescapable consequences. Their function was not destruction for chaos’ sake, but the restoration of a violated order—though often in deeply unsettling ways. They appear where something has been breached, where boundaries require redefinition—some- times with pain.
Of Feelers and Furies is also the story of a metamorphosis of a palm tree. Parts of the plant are frozen in the process of becoming something else. The heels of the palm become a kind of strange new body. Thorns come out of the wall, transforming the space into a body itself—with its own protective mechanisms.
The thorn is a central figure here: a point of contact that is also a point of defense. It gestures toward the porcupine dilemma: the impossibility of closeness without the risk of injury. In order to survive the cold, porcupines huddle together—but if they come too close, they wound each other. They must find a distance that allows proximity without harm. My materials, like my forms, live in that tension—between intimacy and aggression, openness and withdrawal.
Donna Haraway’s text Tentacular Thinking served as a framework for this body of work. “Tentacle” comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning ‘feeler’, and tentare, meaning ‘to feel’ and ‘to try’. This has become a principle: a way to explore different mediums and forms. Tentacular beings can help us rethink and challenge our way of being in this more-than-human world.
Suska Bastian.
Spines,
Body armour.
Both disquieting and attractive, the thorn prompts us to remember. With our cellular memory revived, we regain contact with this eminence. It is through this proven moment that we are able to stand in front of the artworks and appreciate their significance, without necessarily getting closer. It is through the mediation of this past touch that we apprehend the work’s materiality, its corporeality.
‘For the sensible to occur - and for there to be sensation - something intermediate is necessary’1 . And this hybrid, removed from its environment, becomes the mechanics of a journey towards an awareness of the living with which we co-exist.
Hidden beneath the transparent, synthetic velum, they don’t yet penetrate the textile and the resistance is palpable. The canvas stretches, marbled by the light. Vibrating, these undulations are reminiscent of walking spiders, water-repellent creatures.
But Suska Bastian’s work does not linger in meditative contemplation. She transforms this idealised nature, telling the story of culture through the non-human.
‘By producing permanent modifications that can be transmitted from generation to generation, living things produce culture, which is therefore not a human prerogative, but rather a kind of inheritance that is not anatomical but ecological.’2
It is through these abstract landscapes, these stirring forms, conceptual and poetic structures, that we seem to rediscover these plant motifs with anthropomorphic curves.
Staged, the thorns, stones and wood bark are in turn augmented and embezzled, set with disinstrumented ornaments, coated with graphite, weighed down by bitumen - a mixture of viscous and glutinous hydrocarbons. Sparkling from a certain angle, Bastian’s works evoke a seductive stance without ever entirely avoiding a certain violence.
Isolated from this idealised nature, the plant elements take on a composite language that conveys the idea of continuity, where every form of life recalls the formulation of an archaic existence. A hybrid idiom that suggests the need to weave unexpected modes of cooperation, made of multiple temporalities and materialities.
Stefania Angelini.
1. E. Coccia, La Vie Sensible, p.27. 2. ibid, p; 60. 3. E. Coccia, Metamorphoses, p.50.
