with Andrey Bogush, Chloé Delarue, Eva Fàbregas, Christopher Fülleman, Ambra Viviani (curated by Simon W. Marin)

The exhibition POLYMERIC LUST, guest curated by Simon Wursten Marin for Display in Berlin presents works that are all made out of materials belonging to the family of plastics. By gathering artists whose common feature is to create mainly from synthetic materials, the exhibition invites to question the often schizophrenic relationship we have with these materials. Both crucial and omnipresent in contemporary daily life, synthetic polymers are nonetheless a symbol of artificiality and stand for the current ecological disaster we no longer ought to ignore. Our dependency on plastic testifies to our need to hermetically compartmentalize and to rationalize our surrounding environment. As such, it guarantees human domination over a nature considered alien, erratic or threatening, in that it provides us with a technology that is malleable, hygienic, and adaptable to any of our needs. In other terms, plastic acts as a barrier between the human and the non-human realms, the former assimilating from the latter only that which is contained, processed and neutralized. The paradox of plastic, however, is that while it allows to maintain a sterile bubble around us, it also contaminates our surrounding environment just as much as ourselves, at both a micro-chemical and macro-environmental level. These undying, virtually indestructible molecules are progressively pervading the whole organic world—including our bodies—and are already set to leave an everlasting trace of our utopia of a world under vacuum at a geological scale.With recent technological developments—from bioplastics to 3D-printed skin tissue—, the boundary between the artificial and the natural is becoming increasingly blurred. It thus appears urgent to formulate a new holistic framework to define the relations between animated and unanimated, human and non-human, organic and synthetic bodies—a framework that would base its systemic approach on the permeability of membranes, the porosity of bodies and the synergy of substances rather than on a hermetic ontology of species and matters.Drawing the visitor’s attention on their own materiality, the works displayed in the exhibition allow to reflect particularly on the physical interaction between these synthetic materials and the human body. POLYMERIC LUST is articulated in a way that reminds of a domestic environment. Gathering objects whose seemingly daily appearance is systematically altered by their own materiality, the exhibition sheds a particular light on the formal aspect of the artworks beyond their individual narratives. Plastic becomes the true protagonist of a show that not only makes it visible as a material, but also perceivable with the other senses.