Gigi Malherbe, Treatment can help, but this condition can’t be cured, 2024 (LEFT) and Adele Warner, THE FORTRESS OF MY BODY (the seat of narcissistic operations), 2024 (RIGHT).

Gallery 4

Cybermancy

Adele Warner and Gigi Malherbe

Roomsheet

Cybermancy brings together Gigi Malherbe’s and Adele Warner’s meditations on the short-comings of the human body. As the suffix “mancy” denotes, artworks cast a speculative gaze to the near contemporary and future to examine the integration of technology with the physicality and decay of the body. Suspended above the gallery floor, they evoke a boundlessness and timelessness only capable in a digital space. Work’s float in denial to the natural decay that all must adhere to.

Malherbe’s work draws from lived experience and observations in regards to living with a disability and its relationship with technological advancements. Utilising her own personal retina scans, medically used for tracking and documenting the progressiveness of her vision disability, Malherbe captures and archives evidence of the degenerative, incurable nature of her condition. Depicting her impairment alongside captcha, a security test to distinguish human and computers apart, Malherbe ponders on the potential for biological and mechanical matter to integrate through advancements in biomedical and assistive technology and its ability to decelerate aspects of degenerative conditions and enable greater bodily autonomy.

Drawing on the writings of Ernest Becker, Warner explores the decline of collective ideologies as a motivator of our psyches and the rise in its place, the project of the self. It correlates the simultaneous increase in our capabilities to document, edit and disseminate self-aggrandising digital imprints of ourselves with a vital facet of human character that demands to be seen as essential. THE FORTRESS OF MY BODY (the seat of narcissistic operations) is a realisation that the universality of narcissism in contemporary media (both social and mass) is not inherently a fault, but a natural reaction to the grotesque horror of our own bodily decay.

The intervention of technology in the body is something that is not yet an everyday reality, yet through Cybermancy Malherbe and Warner examine its potentiality as a tool to analyse and control the trajectory of an individual's corporeal narrative. Drawing from technological intervention on micro and macrocosmic scales, both artists scan and suspend parts of their bodies that will succumb to biological deterioration to create a static space that defies laws of the physical world.