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V New Sculpture20.3.2018 — 21.4.2018

Athanor’s closing web exhibi-tion gathers three projects by four young international artists. At the acme of a conceptual philosoph-ical tower, these three artworks deal with transmutation of mat-ter as the central process for the artist / alchemist. The artist’s la-bor is equally relevant as his/her conceptualization of the piece of art, thus it is not exclusively per-formed by hand. What links these projects is an agitated process of creative destruction leading to the production of artworks, which are simultaneously fixed in certain compositions and open to multiple reconfigurations.

Destructure by Mahajan and Henry is an ephemeral sculpture composed of a range of 15 tech-nological object forms spanning pre-historic to the contemporary era and including an axe, an aba-cus, a compass, a Nintendo con-

troller, an iPhone 5 and a bionic hand. These objects were chemi-cally destroyed, reflecting both the natural processes of erosion and destruction, and also the march of obsolescence in technologi-cal progress. Firstly sourced as 3d models from the internet, the objects were 3d-printed in pol-ystyrene and painted white. The objects were then arranged ver-tically in three layers inside of a clear acrylic box, mimicking the most common display device in history and art museums. The ver-tical arrangement references the archaeological layering of history as objects and tools are placed or lost in the earth over generations. The erosive process, realized by pouring acetone from the top of the box which leaked through, de-composed these tools and it only left dissolved, unrecognizable, almost organic masses, as ghosts in the history of humankind.

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Copy of is an hybrid work by Yürgen — nom de plume for Fa-bian Wolf — between video and installation, exploring bonds and boundaries between what is per-ceived to be original and its copy. In a performative video, a 7’’ sin-gle of the song My Generation by The Who, was copied by hand, through basic analogue molding and modelling techniques. 10 con-secutive copies, or “generations”, were then produced applying the same process for each of them. The resulting vinyl copies are certainly unplayable, yet the naive craft of the artist’s process turns into an act of creation more than destruction.Icy Coal Tons is a web-based ani-mation created by young artist Le-andro Estrella expressly for Ath-anor №5 conclusive exhibition. This piece originated as a sum of Estrella’s previous research around themes such as iconoclasty and destruction art. Since 2013, the artist has been gathering still and motion pictures on a Tumblr platform and a Youtube playlist. Both of these channels became raw sources for a digital environ-ment eventually called Icy Coal Tons (word scramble for “icono-clasty”).

Inside this scenario, stacks of crystallized debris float and re-volve, overlapping up to the point when they completely fill the screen frame. The scene structure is different every time, according to the algorithm and to external conditions (browser, data speed, …). Random images are cap-tured from the artist’s tumblr and emerge inside the crystals’ surfac-es, like projected references lost in space. The background concurs to shape the final appearance, oscil-lating between a pitch black void and video material sourced from the youtube playlist. The rendered environment acts as an enchant-ing lullaby, a relaxing mantra in which the referenced artworks are kept as jarred treasures, while at the same time being almost un-recognizable and completely de-contextualized.