FEVER

Imagine entering a space that feels like the inside one’s own body — warm, higher than room temperature, with a sonic environment that is akin to hearing underwater — a single tone, drawn out and distorted. Perhaps it’s the cocooned, garbled sensation of being inside a womb, except there’s no moistness. For the artist Christiane Peschek, the exhibition Fever is the sensation — and fiction — of being in a fever dream; of heat rising from within; the desert as a feeling. The prompt is to imagine one’s own dissolution, urged by a feverish hallucination, a place between sickness and desire. The prompt is to contain a barren landscape within.

Mirroring the rising temperatures due to now-irreversible climate change, which are felt in our bodies, Peschek was inspired by their field research in the Liwa Desert southwest of Abu Dhabi, which borders Saudi Arabia and the Empty Quarter. Glazing NIKA Project Space’s windows is a burnt orange, the color of UAE sunsets, evoking a thin membrane that delineates the inside from the outside, indexing a porousness with our surroundings.

Here, seven organisms come into being as fictional figures, titled according to tarot card icons Peschek created. Think The Lovers, The Gatekeeper and The Ghost, among others. Supplemented by a 33-card deck, these apparitions come into being in a cloudy white-on-grey as works on silk, digitally manipulated from AI-generated imagery. They conjure the sense of a fossilized past and a hazy future, constantly refashioned and folding like embryos and spines.  More specifically, they reference the ancient Greek and Egyptian symbol of the ouroboros, swallowing its own tail in a timeless loop of self-annihilation and rebirth. Taking on an oracular connotation, there is some unspoken wisdom or myth that they bestow. Juxtaposed with three sleek sculptures of an elongated snake tooth— one of which hangs from the ceiling like a hook, dripping an orange venom —this is an otherworldly atmosphere of unknown tools and prophesies. In Peschek’s universe, the snake is the guard and keeper of the desert.

Ancient scroll

Primal hush

This one is dedicated to the ghosts.

Upstairs, an ASMR voice accompanies the viewer on a loop, drawing out this world in soothing tones. Peschek’s ouroboros  morphs, ingesting its venom gland in three Gothic sword-like forms. The gland, a hand-blown glass vessel encased in a 3D-printed rib cage, symbolizes a defense and anti-aging system turned toxic and self-destructive — a powerful analogy of the autoimmune body attacking itself, as well as the poisoning of Gaia, our planetary home.

Peschek’s practice is concerned with creating tech-accentuated, sensorial spaces for hybrid bodies, with ritualized practices that counteract environmental and corporeal damage. Within this idea is an understanding of health — both digital and unmediated— sourced from mystical traditions, alchemy and immersion.

The performative tarot reading which takes place at the exhibition opening is partly dependent on the luck of the draw and partly on magic. Concepts of renewal, and the poison as the cure, repeat underneath the tarot deck’s undulating grey forms. Bearing AI interpretations that are based on Peschek’s words, the deck presents a utopian vision of interconnected co-existence.

As part of Peschek’s scripting of Gaia — broken down into earth, water, air, and fire as separate art installations — this staging of fire proposes a world that is ready for desertification, fittingly in a country that is 80% desert. Dressed for climate disaster, Fever’s performers each wear a tech-inspired kimono and a down coat embedded with cooling gel packs. Is this a world without humans? No, but as The World card posits, it marks the ending of the cycle of human dominance: “The World is no longer defined by human triumph, but by the Earth‘s quiet reclamation.”

Constructing futures with the help of an Other, Peschek crafts learnings that draw from the body’s knowledge, tech-oracles, and a bit of fiction. As Ursula K. Le Guin put it, “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

Nadine Khalil