Vernissage on Friday, 8 July, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Boryana Rossa has been one of the most colourful figures in contemporary art from the late 1990s to this day. At the heart of the concept she follows in her solo exhibition at Kvadrat 500 lies the viewpoint that technology is a means of liberation, not of war. ‘The Mehanista: 8 Portraits of Cyborgs’ is a cyberfeminist manifesto presenting the idea of Self, along with all its identity characteristics such as gender, race, species, ethnicity, nationality, and class background, as a hybrid and plastic concept conditioned by our ever-changing relationship with the environment, animals, machines. We are not isolated, singular selves, but complex, syncretic beings. We exist in symbiosis together with the microbes that live inside us; we depend on our phones and computers; some of us live with artificial, life-saving electronic implants. The environment, including that created by us, can either avenge itself for our misdeeds or simply not withstand the unceremonious insolence with which we treat it as our servant.
The portraits of cyborgs were inspired by historical and contemporary semi-documentary and semi-fictional images, accompanied by manifesto narratives from antiquity to the present day. The selected images clearly show that the ideas of hybridism of people and technology are not novel, despite the active discussion in its contemporary form dating back only a century. A feminist view of this relationship requires technology to be a means of liberation and criticises its use to fulfil the primal human desire to dominate, rule and destroy itself and everything else.
