Obviously Unthinkable: Matter Rebellion

Experience the hidden forces of matter through the inner-animated landscape of Thixocymatics, a Black Smoking Mirror, and a singing vagina in Nina and the Robots. In collaboration with LIMA, the program will be supplemented by a screening of Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Talking about Similarity.

After human-made materials recently outweighed the Earth’s biomass, a matter of rebellion has urgently come into focus.  Fossilised philosophies of obedient materiality* have been replaced by a vision of active matter with a divergent, open-ended evolution.

Trigger Warning: The program contains nudity and extreme body art

Thixocymatics (by Aldo Brinkoff) is a kinetic sculpture that explores the fragile threshold between order and collapse. Using tools from the world of construction—specifically concrete formwork—the artist created an instrument that carefully manipulates a block of thixotropic calcium. Rather than producing stable patterns, the material resists predictability. It slowly shifts, continuously reshaping itself into an evolving, unstable landscape. The work embodies a dialogue with material agency, where control gives way to emergence, and structure yields to fluid transformation.

Nina and the Robots (by Cindy Coutant) is an opera that stages the encounter between two bodies: a human and a soft robot driven by compressed air. Filmed as a live performance in two long takes, the piece converges into a breath-heavy face-off where the singing merges with the robot’s pump (driving both the score and movement) in a moment of technological teleonanism.

Black Smoking Mirror  (by Gert-Jan Prins and Martijn van Boven)is a performance about resistance, friction and obstruction of the canvas by laser engraving surrounded by electronic sound.

Talking About Similarity (by Ulay and Marina Abramović) is a performance about self-imposed silence, which took place in Amsterdam on November 30, 1976.

About the curators
Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch have been working in tandem since 1998 creating multi-sensory installations and performances prodding the slippery origins of the physical world. The duo’s artworks have emerged through unorthodox collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), RySQ (Rydberg Atom Quantum Simulator), and Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft).

The people at iii have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘Obviously Unthinkable: Matter Rebellion’ in the subject line + your name in the email.