Acid Arcs

The three parts are one machine. Heilt, six industrial fans in a rigid row, drives air in a relentless, escapeless cycle; that air animates Heiss, a tent of plastic film that ripples as if breathing; and the breathing wall, in turn, faintly disturbs Leviathan, the body crated at the centre. The mechanical drone fills the room and is felt on the skin. The argument is built into the physics, not just the wall text: a full-body experience of circulation and containment. The arcs of the title are this: the chemical burn-paths between the elements and the path of a single breath travelling through them, kinetic and chemical at once.

Leviathan is a returning character, and it has changed. In BAD THINGS HAPPEN (2022) the body lay horizontal in a water-filled tank: the specimen position, the museum gaze. Here it stands vertical inside an industrial crate, glowing from a dismantled screen: the logistics position, the warehouse gaze. The materials are the same, the same impossible breathing through tubes, but the body is now packed for transport and storage: it has passed from the system that displays objects to the system that moves them, from the laboratory to the warehouse. Read across the two exhibitions, Leviathan is a body with a biography, and the biography is about how a body gets managed over time.

The failure the title names is not a metaphor. The chemistry is unstable; the breath is mechanical; the body cannot survive without the pump. The work sits permanently on the verge of needing to be replaced, and what keeps it going is maintenance: paid for by the institution, performed out of hours, invisible to the visitor and visible only to the technician who comes in at night. The opening shows a system in control; the actual condition of the work is a slow, ongoing failure kept just off the schedule. That gap, between the displayed stability and the hidden upkeep, is the part of the work that is most true.

"Does the gallery space, with its controlled climate, insurance obligations and white walls, inevitably undermine the claim of a 'controlled environment on the verge of failure'? Is the gallery itself the system that Acid Arcs claims to critique?"

Critical review, 2026

Yes, and the work does not pretend otherwise. I do not step outside the dispositif; Acid Arcs is the work the apparatus of the institution lets me make, and that apparatus is part of what the work argues against. The gallery is the controlled environment, and the piece runs its small failure inside it rather than imagining an outside it does not have. Personal ecology, here, is partly the discipline of knowing exactly where my feet are while I work: making the critique from inside the thing being criticised, and saying so.