Reiner Maria Matysik (born in Duisburg in 1967) uses instruments from the natural sciences and visual arts for his speculative biology of the future. Recording, describing, and classifying are just as much a part of his artistic practice as camouflage, deception, and irony. Models of post-evolutionary species with proliferating forms reveal that the biological nature of humans—here supplemented by the (il)logical—is a dead end on the path to the future and can only survive as anti-biology through entanglement and transformation with other phytic, animalistic, or biofactual realities of life.
Reflecting on the disciplines, the artist devises utopian scenarios for a future of the human beyond humans. Only as a hybrid and post-evolutionary symbiont (Donna Haraway) is future of human life conceivable – not only for Matysik. Such ideas enriched us through the objects, drawings, and video works, but also through the performances and participatory projects of an artist who has been reflecting on the virulent questions of today since the mid-1990s: “It’s about the relationship of humans to themselves and to other life forms, their hybris and arrogance, hierarchies and blindness.”
With the kind support of the district funding fund of the Senate Department for Culture and Community.
Photo: sexual creeping, institut für postevolutionäre lebensformen. (Installationsansicht), Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, 2021, © Reiner Maria Matysik
