Artist: Tina Bxtq
Title: Obstacles As Wings
Curator: Štefánia Ďuricová
Venue: Šopa Gallery, Košice
The future of posthuman and queer imagination unfolds through hybrid bodies, monstrous and angelic beings that resist stable categorisation. They dismantle entrenched ideas of the body and identity. The angelic fragments presented in the exhibition are remnants of a performance in which the body operates as a material capable of both regeneration and decay. The body is understood as a costume, a mode of self-expression and lived experience. The wearable object embodies a two-headed posthuman being in a state of disintegration; its entrails loosen and spill, giving rise to new parasitic entities that emerge from the collapse. What unravels is a deconstructed, posthuman and non-binary corporeality.
In Obstacles As Wings, the angel is not a transcendent figure, although the reference to the fallen angel cannot be dismissed, but a post-traumatic being forced to adapt. The non-human organisms that emerge within this dystopian world, such as insects and decomposing animal forms, do not evoke threat, nor do they appear morbid. Entrails and abstracted organic elements function as carriers of emotion rather than representations of violence itself. Tina’s aesthetic deliberately engages with cuteness. Cuteness operates as a tool of attraction as well as power, a subversive element of the everyday. Here, cuteness functions as gender ambivalence: the beings resist fixed gender identification. Between tenderness and monstrosity, tension emerges, an unstable space from which new possibilities can expand.
The opening performance activated the space and integrated all media into a single narrative. The costume remains in the gallery as a lasting trace, making the installation site-specific. It functions as a continuous sequence in which drawings and ceramic objects extend and complete the performative act. Performance assumes the role of the narrator, exercising control and transferring discomfort from personal experience onto the audience. Trauma and bodily metamorphosis become strategies for overcoming obstacles and negotiating reality. This “psycho-magical” act carries a reflective and therapeutic dimension. The exhibition’s theatricality and performativity generate unease and surreal intensity, while simultaneously opening space for imagining a possible future world. Traumatic evolution functions as a point of departure – a scar, a rupture within the established system of the body, shaped by collective experience. In this way, the exhibition engages with Rosi Braidotti’s proposition that the posthuman condition does not signal the end of the subject, but its reconfiguration under conditions of crisis, where new forms of existence emerge from negative experiences.
The gallery space transforms into a dystopian world – a laboratory dominated by human-animal hybrids, parasitic entities and non-human organisms hatching from eggs. Parasitism here does not signify violence or destruction alone, but also a peculiar form of symbiosis. The world Tina constructs adapts to the emergence of new entities, pointing toward the dysfunctional systems in which we currently live. We witness the disintegration of the collective body as a consequence of polycrises, violence and death, conditions that cannot be excluded from our reality.
