Management presents Jura Shust’s new body of work extending from the artist’s special commission for the Gwangju Biennale in Korea curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.
Based in Berlin, Jura Shust explores the relationship between ritual and escapism. Intrigued by semantic polysemy, informational intoxication, and the primal desire for oblivion, he reflects on how the mythological overlaps with the technological. Based on scientific research, Shust’s practice merges sculpture, video, and installation to construct mental landscapes illuminated by ethnoreligious beliefs and flooded by biopolitical intentions.
For the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Jura Shust presented his multimedia project Neophyte III, which explores how ancient traditions of communication with nature merge with contemporary technological advancements. According to myth, on Kupala Night animals and plants acquire the gift of speech, fire and water are endowed with the properties of purification and regeneration. Neophyte III revisits the traditional Slavic ceremony of the summer solstice Kupala depicting eight Belarusian refugees near the Belarusian border in Poland.
An improvised community performs a circular procession at the geopolitical border using the technology of a rite. Traversing the elements and syncing with pine resin, the ancient quintessence of vitality, the group acts as a molecular cluster or a neural network trying to understand itself through its environment. This video presents a ritual as an ancient form of communication with the environment, exploring contemporary geopolitical tensions in the light of the Kupala rite of passage.
Installation view of Jura Shust’s “Untitled (diptych)” and “Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession” at the 15th Gwangju Biennale
Excerpt from interview with Nicolas Bourriaud in Frieze Magazine, September 2024
Colin Siyuan Chinnery
We relate to sound in a very different way to images: it’s more primordial and more sensuous. We feel sound without having to think about it. How have you designed the physical space to work with this medium?
Nicolas Bourriaud
The entrance to the exhibition is a tunnel. People are conducted along a specific route; I don’t want them to roam too freely. The first floor is devoted to the very urban-saturated space. The second floor is about the feeling of oppression we can get in what appears to be a much more open space – the countryside – but which is not actually so. It brings together artworks that are different but lead to the same conclusion. There is a new video by Liam Gillick, for example, shot on Fogo Island, a very beautiful, seductive landscape, which he has juxtaposed with very bureaucratic, administrative sounds. Then you have Max Hooper Schneider, whose work is about extinction and the way we are witnessing, at the moment, a kind of post-apocalyptic state in the world.
The third floor is polyphonies – possibilities of dialogues with the vegetal world, the mineral world, even the robotic world. The fourth floor is about the infinitely big. Here you have artists like Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam and Jura Shust, all interested in shamanism. The top floor – the fifth – is about the molecular, how to show today’s world with the smallest components possible. For example, there is Marina Rheingantz, a Brazilian artist who represents the world with an almost impressionist, postmolecular approach. After the saturation you have when entering the tunnel, you will leave with this view of the infinitely small. Then there is actually a second part to the exhibition.
Jura Shust, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession, 2024
Jura Shust, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession, 2024, detail
Jura Shust, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession, 2024, detail
Jura Shust, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession, 2024, detail
Jura Shust, Untitled (diptych), 2024
Jura Shust, Untitled (diptych), 2024, detail
Jura Shust, Untitled, 2024
Spruce wood, resin, black soil, stainless steel, 78.75 x 27.5 x 2 inches / 200 x 70 x 5 cm
Ultra HD video, sound
14m33s
Edition 2 of 3 + 1AP
“Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession” illustrates the shift from the archaic to the synthetic by featuring eight discarded Christmas tree trunks locked into the metal cluster, referring to both structures of care and exploitation.
Jura Shust, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession, 2024, detail
Exhibition view, Sacred Threads, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, 2024.
The ancient tradition of ritualistic branch cutting is rooted in the connection between ancestors and descendants, where receivers can read the message encoded in a living tree. Inspired by ancient Slavic tree worship practices, the installation metaphorically represents a sacred grove that ancient Slavs would use like a temple to connect to the cosmological nature of the universe.
Jura Shust, Untitled (diptych), 2024, detail
The “Untitled” series of panels is machine-sculpted out of spruce wood with phytomorphic reliefs generated by an AI, filled with soil, and encased in synthetic resin.
Jura Shust, Walking, knocking on the roots, and shaking the spruce paws #8, 2023
Wood, soil, resin, 12.2 × 28.3 in / 31 × 72 cm
Using the metaphor of bio-neurological connections or root systems, this series displays the architecture of a deep learning model as a fossilized imprint of a self-reflecting neural network. The idea of a disembodied spirit as an AI aligns with an ancient tradition of communing with animated nature observed in various Indigenous cultures. Recent advances in AI-powered sensation make communication with non-human species more plausible than ever, promising a challenge to an anthropocentric worldview while marking a new state of surveillance.
Spruce wood, resin, black soil, stainless steel
157.5 x 27.5 x 2 inches / 400 x 70 x 5 cm
Spruce wood, resin, black soil, stainless steel
78.75 x 27.5 x 2 inches / 200 x 70 x 5 cm
Spruce trunks, stainless steel, resin, coniferous needles
94.5 x 86.5 x 78.75 inches / 240 x 220 x 200 cm
Steel, gum rosin
64.125 × 4 × 5.675 in / 163 × 10 × 15 cm