Chora
spatial installation • 2024
With her immersive video installation Chora, artist Gaia Radić introduces a new chapter in the body of virtual worlds that perform as perceptual narratives and transform the spaces they inhabit into autopoietic worlding systems.
In Chora, the space waits in stillness for a visitor. Upon their arrival, a split point of view emerges within the expansive virtuality. Through two opposing apertures, a geological terrain, seemingly unbound by any specific site, begins to unfold. The world, comprised of interconnected lagoons, appears to overflow with an ethereal primordial liquid, keeping the space in constant flux.
view of the installation at Aksioma, Ljubljana, Slovenia
photos by Domen Pal / Aksioma
This steady stream guides the visitor’s eye along the creased topology that is, in turn, slowly winding its way through the viewer as well. In this encounter, the viewer’s perceptual organs become channels through which the space reflects upon itself. Chora both shapes and is shaped by its material host and realises its generative potential when the physical and virtual realms meet through the viewer’s perception.
The heterotopic space functions as a sieve where one world is reflected and refracted into another, producing a self-referential reality that continually reforms itself. For as soon as self-formulation begins, dissipation follows. When the viewer leaves, the landscape settles, and Chora returns to its dormant state until the arrival of a new body.
Curator: Maja Burja
Sound design and programming: Gašper Torkar
Sensor and technical assistance: Oskar Kandare
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Financial support: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana and
The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia
The final projections were rendered in cooperation with the Czech National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava.