Celeste Viv Ly

APTX 4869 | -321 °F : 133° 79.515 N 012° 90.797 E is a series of time-based sculptural assemblages involve the transformation of the material cycle of water and ice, its instrumentation and ‘weaponisation’ (the manifestation of icicles and tools made of water), expanding to the Sisyphean cycle of labour, transportation, violence, mobility and displacement. Referencing cryopreservation, divination techniques, hyperstition, speech act, the hyperobject, freezing as an archival and empirical method, the Essex refrigerator lorry incident and private cryonics organisations, the time-based installation is composed of fluid objects and the residual effect of human subject in equal parts in an open-ended assemblage of networked agencies. Noting water’s transition of states as a requisite for its weaponisation, and that ice is unsuspected, 'invisible', and a lethal, untraceable weapon, performative processes of freezing, ceromancy and molybdomancy were referenced in the manifestation and manufacturing of tools and ‘weapons’ through the medium of water, revealing and examining its registers of harm and synergy while spotlighting water as the universal solvent on both material and symbolic levels.

APTX 4869 | -321 °F : 133° 79.515 N 012° 90.797 E was part of Interassemblages ⎏ Nodal Relay, an exhibition from 2-6 December 2022 at ACUD Galerie, ACUD Matcht Neu, Berlin, Germany.

A sonic iteration developed from the body of work was live on 28 March 2023 on Montez Press Radio, London, UK / New York, US.

The sculpture 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒐𝒑𝒉𝒂𝒈𝒐 𝒗𝒊𝒗𝒖𝒎 𝒂𝒆𝒓𝒊 evolves from the transformation of the material cycle of water and wax, its instrumentation and ‘weaponisation’. Developed from the artist’s ongoing research on cryopreservation, freezing as an archival and empirical method, transnational logistics, the Essex refrigerator lorry incident and private cryonics organisations, the work expands to the Sisyphean cycle of labour, transportation, violence, mobility and displacement on a larger socio-cultural scale. The work and the ongoing research project it is part of inquire into how certain standalone cases of humanitarian crises relate to and amplify our collective understanding of the cryopolitical (related to thermo-politics) in which temperature experiences and effects are interwoven with human rights violations, legal issues and colonial legacies. As in particular scenarios, cold is instrumentalised to control and persecute individuals and targeted communities.

Composed of the crystallised remains of ceromancy and mirroring inland territorial waters, the piece becomes the nexus of interwoven time and potential futures. (Ceromancy is a form of divination in which solidified wax forms are interpreted to predict the future in a material transformation echoing the motion in which bodies fall into water. The process was conducted in seawater transported from 133° 79.515 N 012° 90.797 E and poured within the sarcophagus.) 

Reflecting on the notion that the sea has been in some way a gigantic collective sarcophagus in light of recent cases of humanitarian crises at sea, the spiritual syntaxes of augury and obsequies embodied in the materiality of white translucent wax, and the process of transporting seawater — which parallels the movement and displacement of bodies carried across continents and waters— converge in the middle, as a tribute, a resting place beyond time, and the intensive signification of the aforementioned notion that has haunted the artist throughout all this time.

in sarcophago vivum aeri MMXXIII was exhibited from 17-19 February 2023 at Ugly Duck, London, UK. 

Contact celeste.viv.ly@alumni.rca.ac.uk for sales enquiries.

Artefacts of divination / Referencing divination techniques, hyperstition, speech act, the hyperobject, the work investigates the intersection of parafictional artefacts and the effect of language, shifting towards the notion of instrumentalisation and deep time. In a process that has its result shaped by many nonhuman agents at play (temperature, volume and shear rate of water, and temperature, density, deformation rate dependency, viscoelasticity, yield stress and thixotropy etc. of the molten metal) aside from the human gesture of pouring, the process could be seen as alchemical, an instance of entangled more-than-human agency; it parallels the process of incantation and speech acts through the manifestation of effects across 'dimensions' (from the immaterial to material in incantation and speech acts, from liquid to solid in the divination process to aid the interpretation of an immaterial quality through the material). This connects to the inherent logic or illogic of interpreting an object based on its material form and its inextricability from the existent framework of signification, the binary pairing of the signified and the signifier, and the material-semiotic relation intrinsically humanly constructed. 

The material resemblance of these objects to 'luxurious' objects (due to the material they are made from, its surface texture and reflection that may indicate value in a way that is culturally ingrained), tools and weapons (made from metal, their oblong and sharp-edged shapes -- albeit also evoking the sense that they are weapons from a different world or civilisation due to their organic, skeletal and insectile characteristics) and the arrangement of these objects verging on the archival and taxonomical bring about questions of attributed meaning (as suggested by the part of the title ‘hamburgevons’, which is often used as the placeholder text for assessing or demonstrating the visual form of a document or a typeface), of interpretation, functionality, how instruments of destruction (weapons) and subjugating the other (tools and hunting equipment) are cherished and fetishised throughout history, and how meaning when allocated with a material form can have a generative and/or destructive quality in instances of incantation and speech acts, hinting towards notions like syntactical restructuring that could be necessary in dismantling current systems and instigating base level structural change. In the perforation of the water surface, the boundary between dimensions (dimensions of fundamental states, and dimensions between the material and immaterial, between cause and effect) is also ruptured. The process is a moment of violent convergence of creation and destruction, paralleling the manifestation-like process of weapon manufacturing and weaponisation, and the interplay of eros and thanatos. 

Contact celeste.viv.ly@alumni.rca.ac.uk for sales enquiries.

Fluids and different types of wine are infused into each other via transfusion tubes in ‘intra-graft’. Referencing allogeneic bone grafting, material syntaxes and signification of transubstantiation, biological circuitry, prosthesis, and transfusion of body fluids, the work aims to investigate the subtleties of violence, the exchange between fluids, bodies (rigid or amorphous) and chemicals, and its implications in contexts of intercorporeality and the relation between the self, the other and beyond inherent within those visceral, disembodied actions. 

Grafting is projected as a process that involves synergy and the confrontation between different agents. A process that questions what is considered the subject before and after. In this case, the strands of blood signified by the different types of wine are metaphorically incompatible and therefore unsafe if it were to be infused back to a living organism, and many types of infections could be spread by the transfer of blood. Through making a sculptural assemblage that unfolds continually through time due to the ever changing nature of the materials involved, the work inscribes a process that potentialises a dormant and yet perhaps dangerous system.