Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence

Featuring: Camilla Alberti, Bai Yiyi, Anastasia Komar

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present, Interspecies: New Scenarios Of Symbiotic Coexistence, a three-person show featuring Camilla Alberti, Anastasia Komar, Bai Yiyi. The works in the show exist in a fluid limbo, where transformative metamorphosis between organic and artificial is still a potential state. Blurring the lines between the known and the yet unknown, the works in the exhibition both test and already envision a different interconnectedness and symbiosis of different entities in a continuous intertwining between human and non-human. 

February 25th - March 22nd, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

Hybridity becomes a paradigm for rethinking our constitution as humans, as embedded parts in a broader ecosystem of vital interconnections, both on an organic and technological level. We are creatures inhabited by microorganisms, and the endless technological extensions of our bodies today implement and modify our functions and the possibilities of interacting with the external world. By blending advanced science and technology with ancestral knowledge and imagination, the artists in the show force a relevant reflection and reconsideration of bodies, industrial relics, and all relationships with the non-human through their contemporary mythopoetic practice. 

If the role of art is not to provide answers but just prompt relevant questions, an unleashed experimentation between knowledge and materials allows those artists to formulate hypotheses and test them, at least on the philosophical and ontological hypothetical level, by materializing those in aesthetical presences. Moving in between the realms of laboratory-oriented research and imagination, with this bio function, the artists envision alternative scenarios of coexistence and engineer new symbiosis. 

In her laboratory-oriented and craftsmanship-centered practice, Italian artist Camilla Alberti tests alternative coexistence scenarios between other species and elements of the Anthropocene. Those mechanized armatures are inhabited by lichens, whose biological life is encapsulated and can be integrated into the man-made artifice in Camilla. At the same time, the artist’s specific attention to materials and processes, which we can see from her welding and embroideries, eventually celebrates and highlights the power of human creative craftsmanship over its tendency for destruction. Collaborating with nature in creating her work, the artist engages with natural and chemical processes, visualizing a hybridization of bodies already in place while exploring possible transformations in our current relationship with the world.

This hybridization between biological and technological entities and systems is central to Anastasia Komar’s work. Operating at the intersection between developmental biology, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science, Komar’s seductive canvases already embody complex scientific studies and data, providing with immediacy a strong visual metaphor of this fluid intercorporeality, penetrability and symbiotic relations between living and artificial entities, which science already allows. While a delicate accumulation of brushstrokes translates to the perpetual and restless movement of all particles, parasites of metallic and glass polymer creatures are creeping into the surface as mutating species develop in this continuous flow of adaptation and evolution, creation and destruction. 

Merging artificial and biological with this body of work, Komar has found, in those hybrid canvases, a form of art able to translate an idea of interdependence and interconnectedness between entities.

Shanghai-based artist Bai Yiyi similarly visualizes on his canvas this notion of simultaneity and interconnectivity between beings as part of a broader network and ecosystem of essential relations. Initially focused on the experiences and relations between humans and machines, Bai Yiyi's paintings have now extended to an exploration of a more universal interconnection between humans and all beings as part of a mysterious cosmic order. Embracing the traditional notion of “Dao,” and the idea of a collective consciousness governing all life processes, Yiyi’s seemingly abstract and densely symbolic paintings visualize this multifaceted fluid impenetrability of all things, envisioning alternative synthetic and symbiotic existential dimensions that could allow mutual survival and energetic health preservation. Fluttering and drifting into a fluid flow, Bai Yiyi creates revelatory visual embodiments of a reality made of minuscule essences, which connect, converge, and dissolve into one another.

Ultimately, the exhibition aims to challenge the anthropocentric paradigm and all traditional hierarchical scales established by traditional science, prompting viewers to reconsider the relationships with the non-human world as part of a broader information and relational system in continuous evolution. Resisting any apocalyptic post-human scenario, those works try to reintegrate the human presence within a border order of natural circles and ecological systems while envisioning possible developments of this symbiotic intercorporeality needed for mutual survival. The notion of interspecies embodied by those works ominously and visionarily visualizes this essential simultaneity and interconnectivity between beings as part of a broader network and ecosystem of vital relations and interdependencies.