Events/Openings

Thomas Feuerstein’s works cut across borders and are universal. They interweave pictorial, linguistic and scientific layers to create “conceptual narration”. Feuerstein works with a variety of media, including sculpture and installation, drawing, painting, photography and netart. In the process, he creates multi-layered references to biology, philosophy of science, economics, politics and cultural history. By interweaving the factual with the fictitious he deconstructs the claims to truth of dogmatic paradigms and allows new systems of meaning to emerge.

STAR JELLY is Thomas Feuerstein’s fourth solo show at 401contemporary. It focuses on the development of a procedural conception of sculpture. With the help of chemists and biologists, Feuerstein has succeeded in creating a new synthetic molecule, which he refers to - not without irony - as the world’s smallest sculpture: PSILAMIN.

Together, the individual works form a living laboratory, which serves to produce PSILAMIN.
At the beginning of the process are glass sculptures in which algae and fungi grow, from which dopamine, a “happiness hormone”, and psilocin, a psychoactive substance already used by the Aztecs as a vision-inducing drug, are derived. The molecular sculpture PSILAMIN, which is synthesised from it, is a mind-altering hallucinogenic, which - if one were to take it - would shift the exhibition space to within our body and transform our perception of the objects in the space: objects begin to breathe, soften and liquefy.

During the production of PSILAMIN, the residual biomass of the algae and fungi creates a viscous slime. Thick threads and streaks combine to form a transparent, liquid sculpture. The psychotropic effect of the hallucinogenic substance, which makes solid objects appear to dissolve in our perception, is reflected as an actual process. The internal world of the psyche and the external one of the polymer slime begin to overlap.

In Feuerstein’s speculative fiction STAR JELLY, which can be experienced at the exhibition as both a visual story and audio play, the slime becomes a narrative about a future community in which everything communicates molecularly. Feuerstein tells a horror story about a “slime age”, between utopia and dystopia, in which we already find ourselves today: “We are born in slime and we end in slime in the grave. In between, we try to keep ourselves dry.”

Thomas Feuerstein (born in1968) lives in Vienna and studied Art History and Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. Since 1997 he has held teaching positions and visiting professorships at various universities and art colleges. Feuerstein’s works and projects use a range of media, encompassing everything from installations, environments, objects, drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs to videos, audio plays and netart. The interplay of linguistic and visual elements, the teasing out of latent connections between fact and fiction, and the intertwining of art and science are some of the key aspects of his work.