Felix Kalmenson

Exhibition Text by Andrei Siclodi

Under the Auspices, the title of this spatial arrangement, responds to the current downward spiral regarding climate protection and ecological sustainability, alongside the rapid rise of injustice, militarization, and the destruction of war. At the center of this exploration — and serving as its guiding motif — are birds: a species both threatened and desired by humans, one that ontologically embodies key aspects of today’s sociopolitical debates: migration, habitat loss, deprivation of freedom. In antiquity, the term ‘auspices’ referred to the practice of observing and interpreting the flight of birds to seek divine fortunetelling in relation to collective undertakings. The behavior of birds thus played a decisive role in decision-making processes concerning the res publica. Drawing on this ancient and largely forgotten practice, Kalmenson creates, through their installation, a multilayered, essayistic reflection — both in content and material — on the fraught political relationship between humans, nature, and technology today. Metal — especially steel in various sculptural forms —serves as the connecting element between the diverse works brought together under the Auspices. Two video works allow for the observation of nocturnal, flying protagonists, both human and non-human.

In the work ‘negative capability (with Kris Dittel)’, an excerpt from a live stream of a birdwatching feed is shown, more specifically the nesting site of a Northern Royal Albatross in New Zealand. The excerpt is interwoven with an audio description of images connected to the tracking and categorization of migratory birds at bird banding stations, as well as with footage from the crash site of Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 from Baku to Grozny, which crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau on December 25, 2024. The nearly static, monochrome night image — fueling the hope for an (ultimately unfulfilled) encounter with the coveted bird — contrasts with the cautious voice of collaborator Kris Dittel, who attempts to grasp the meaning and significance of these images without any prior knowledge of their background.

Some of these images are in fact present in the exhibition, though they remain effectively invisible. In ‘chimeras (gargoyles for a house of abundance)’, they form the hidden foundation of several components that, in Duchampian fashion, articulate a poetics of concealment. Found picture frames, stacked face-down as if resisting the act of framing, carry steel plates upon which the ‘chimeras’ are placed: brightly colored, 3D-printed objects depicting birds inserted headfirst into cups (a method of restraint in the weighing of small birds), as well as the bronze-cast stomach of a dead bird. The stomach is of a mummified Eurasian kestrel who was force-fed as part of an early bird breeding program to procure sacrifices for the sun god Ra in Kafr-‘Ammar in ancient Egypt . The chimeras confront us with actions that have fossilized into grotesque objects — human acts toward the non-human world that, in an unsettling way, fuse ritual with scientific method. 

chimeras (gargoyles for a house of abundance), Bronze, 3D printed PLA, C-prints, galvanized steel, aluminum fittings, found frames, acrylic glass.

In ‘J2-8243’, the second video, mounted on a metallic ‘rib structure’, the occupied passenger cabin of a nighttime commercial flight unfolds in ‘rotating slow motion’. Filmed with a 360-degree camera, the video develops a hypnotic, uncanny pull — intensified by its audio track: an AI-generated voice speaks a sequence of sentences that, in their juxtaposition, form no coherent meaning. This vocal sequence is, in fact, a training text sometimes used by AIs aiming to replicate human voices as accurately as possible. The cinematic principle of unfolding seen in ‘J2-8243’ carries over into the photographic work ‘to eat under the open sky (November 29, 2024)’. A panoramic image of a large crowd, originally captured during the resurgence of protests in Tbilisi against the anti-democratic policies of the pro-Russian regime, is presented here as a static spatiotemporal unfolding. Framed by a steel support structure and overlaid with an orange filter — the kind used in photographic processing to heighten contrast or pierce through fog — the work serves as a reminder that it is still possible to resist the current downward spiral: through empathy, solidarity, and perseverance.