Sea Soma | Dora Durkesac

About

Centrum is excited to announce the solo exhibition Sea Soma by Dora Durkesac.

The sea squirt swims freely in the sea until it finds a place on a rock where it remains for the rest of its life. It digests its nervous system as it doesn’t need it in its static form. This creature provoked a theory that the brain evolved among species following the complexity of bodily movement. Meanwhile, the collaboration between the mind and algorithm is evolving, while soma acquires the anatomy of sitting, hunched back, tech neck, or text claws. In flat encounters, humans experience each other through the infosphere and cycles of data. How do we return to the idea of touch as vision, which is known to be our earliest mode of interaction and feeling of the world? How does dance intertwine the inner and outer stimuli and how does skin become the interface between them? To be in society, one first needs to know how to be alone, perhaps think through liquidity, sea creatures, contradictions, changes. 

Sea Soma is a fictional ecosystem that strives to understand bodily intelligence, touchscreens, and the potential of water and digital objects as healers. It functions through cycles of media transformations, content generators, and mobile apps that capture dancers’ embodied knowledge. It encompasses exploration of the sea, dance, and UX design in the shape of transparent foils, phones, videos, text animations, touch-book, and online diagrams.

The project is a part of the ongoing practice Ecosystems - Rehearsing Collectivity based on exploratory communities regenerating human structures by looking into natural and digital processes (rehearsing-collectivity.com).

Created in collaboration with Ixchel Mendoza Fernandez, Stella Krämer Horta, Lukas Hondrich, Sarah Baron Brljević, Nina Gojić, Sean Marret, Louise Bourinski.

BIO

Dora Đurkesac (b. 1988, Croatia) works in the fields of contemporary dance, new media art, and design research. Her work is shaped through archival, performative and methodological explorations of social choreographies and hybrid ecosystems.  In 2020, Đurkesac was the art director of the digital publication exploring changes in the art institution Everything is New at De Appel, Amsterdam. She participated in the Research Academy at ZHDK in Zurich in 2015 and 2018. Her work and performances have been shown in numerous institutions, such as Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin; Neu Now, Amsterdam; Kreuzberg Pavilion, Berlin; Spike Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; La MAMA Theatre, New York; and Tjarnarbíó, Reykjavik. She was a part of the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt in 2021. Currently, she develops practices and methodologies in the frameworks of Ecosystems - Rehearsing Collectivity. She lives and works in Berlin.

The project was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media. Curated by Rachel Monosov.