Isabelle Andriessen: DORM

Isabelle Andriessen investigates ways to physically animate inanimate (synthetic) materials in order to provide them with their own metabolism, behavior and agency. Her sculptures are agents inhabiting the liminal space between sculpture and performance, composed of materials that act and evolve, seemingly beyond control and often irreversibly. On the occasion of the exhibitions DORM (2021) and BUNK (2021), this publication brings together three distinct voices. Sci-f writer and art critic Mark Von Schlegell contributes a short story in which an engineer is trying to locate a lost AI as a spaceship hurdles of course. In an autonomous photo series photographer Nikola Lamburov reimagines Andriessen’s sculptures, capturing their processes in sticky, eerie and surreal landscapes. Through fractals, liquids, vapors and metals, curator Laura McLean-Ferris’s essay traces the state changes that are enacted across Andriessen’s works, and in doing so finds systems of porous entanglement that flourish in a world without humans.