Paradise Rot

Our bodies have rested, loved, violated. They have spoken, sweated, and moved. Our warm breaths linger, turn into dew, mix into the air that feeds our house plants. The mold feasts on the wine we have lazily left around, a remembrance of our raised glasses to celebrate our existence. A desire fills the room. We learn to look for paradise outside ourselves, external to the world. In the imagination of British poet John Milton’s 17th-century poetry books ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise Regained’, physical hunger leads to humankind’s eviction from paradise and spiritual hunger will help them regain paradise again; a visual fantasy with many variations in different cultures, from the Elysian Fields to the Jannah or the Avesta. Five centuries later, this paradisiacal yearning gets another meaning in Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot (2016). Paradise becomes a place of boundless intertwining in natural processes, there where beginning and end do not exist: “One of the girls turned her head towards the other and said, ‘Let me tell you a fairy tale,’ and the other girl nodded. So the first continued: ‘I’ll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterwards the apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that’s not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve’s legs, scratched open her flesh and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the white bite marks facing out, and after a while the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mould threads grew from the edges of the peel. The mould threads became pubic hair and the bite mark became the slit between the labia. Soon all of Eden followed the apple’s example and started to decompose and rot, and since then this has happened in all gardens and everything in nature; and honey mushrooms came into existence, and rot and parasites and beetles arose. But the apple was first, and it never stops rotting, it just gets blacker. The apple has no end, just like this fairy tale.” Things that disintegrate remind us - as a memento mori - of the realities of our matter, our flesh. As our bodies survive by continuously fighting off rot, mold and infections, we have a closeness to those apples we let lie around, those plants we forget to water, or those dishes we forget to wash. The visceral processes inside our bodies reflect our physical and our mental health and they can affect our desires. Within the domestic and intimate spaces of human living, non-human matter is often trivialized or has to be destroyed for our health. We live together in ecosystems of ambiguity between care and harm. In this exhibition, rot is not an ending but a luscious, lingering state of transition. The wine sours, the flowers whisper to the mold that feeds them, desire clings to decay. Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei and Mila Balzhieva’s works come together in observations on the shapes that more-than-human relationships take on a daily basis. The body itself becomes an intimate ‘house’ for internal processes we tend to ignore. Always together with other life-forms under the same roof, our bodies speak, taste and feed on them. We make each other sick and angry, but we also heal and love together. “We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, that they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.” (Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, 2021). In Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei’s work, body politics operate inwardly, confronting us with how our lived experiences and environments can exert control over our bodies - inside and out [paradise lost]. At the same time, her practice carries the weight of attempts to take back agency in her personal experiences with illness, grief, love, pain, hope and friendship [paradise regained]. Sheikh Rezaei shows new works that explore the aftermath of feelings that linger around the boundaries we try to define for ourselves. Her installations bear memory and the tension between control and surrender: wine glasses that she kept after cosy nights with friends and lovers are clouded with mold, drawings and pedestals host an architectural framework for intricate webs of her personal stories [paradise rot]. Sheikh Rezaei reveals the tenderness within decay, and that the thresholds between self and other are not as solid as they seem. In the exhibition space, otherworldly plants hover midair in holographic form. They become spectral entities, an interface between the seen and unseen. Drawing on Buryat-Mongolian shamanism, Mila Balzhieva’s work suggests that existence unfolds in multiple layers: the Upper World of expanded perception, the Middle World of matter, and the Lower World where memory and rebirth intertwine. How do we communicate with what we cannot grasp? How do we understand the agency of things beyond our own language? Fascinated by the complexities of the needs and desires of houseplants in her own room, Balzhieva embarked on research to understand their erratic behaviour. Orchid-like flowers and spider plants take on different textures, as if they use metamorphosis to discover the possibilities and limitations of interspecies communication: petals start sweating or crying, their stamens and pistils become a digital spectre, their thick petals turn into ash-coloured flesh. In Balzhieva’s world, nature is not the only generative force, such as technology is not only a force of control but a tool for sensing the imperceptible. These translations between organic and digital substances form an ethereal language, bridging our understanding of plant beings in artificial environments. They remind us of the paradise we can find in our private spheres, if we make an effort to understand the other beings that inhabit it. As Olivia Laing writes, “To leave this paradise for the object world, the world of other people, other bodies, other needs and desires, means experiencing inevitable rejection and lack, but there are abundant compensations.”