Magnetic Field
11/06/2026 - 25/07/2026
Amélie Laurence Fortin | Amélie McKee
In Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, scientists spend decades studying the ocean that covers the planet’s surface. They build countless instruments, develop classifications, and produce vast amounts of knowledge, yet remain unable to answer a fundamental question: what are they actually dealing with? Every attempt to render the nonhuman in all its complexity fails. Its structures and functions resist meaning. The more tools they create, the more obvious the limitations of established human conceptual frameworks become. Knowledge offers no proximity to an answer; it instead exposes the vastness of their ignorance. Magnetic Fields emerges from a similar experience. The exhibition does not speak about space or technology in a literal sense. Both artists are interested in phenomena that remain beyond direct perception, yet they do not approach them as scientific subjects. Instead, they focus on the moments when the invisible begins to shape our lives, our behaviour, and our understanding of the world. They are equally interested in the ways we attempt to rationalise and domesticate what ultimately escapes comprehension.
The exhibition opens with Amélie Laurence Fortin’s Gravity, a work that evokes the symbolic gesture of claiming space and asserting control over territory. One of the most recognisable examples of such a gesture remains the placement of a flag on the Moon’s surface. This image has come to symbolise not only exploration, but also the projection of earthly ambitions beyond the limits of our planet. Yet these objects do not function as symbols of victory. They appear instead as relics of a particular idea, traces of a persistent need to mark, measure and control space. The flag is stripped of its original function. The neutrality of aluminium stands in contrast to national colours and identifying symbols, transforming it into an anonymous remnant of a failed expedition. Rather than celebrating conquest, the work points to the fragility of the very idea of domination within a space that resists human notions of ownership and borders.
The search for new territories of exploitation returns in Fortin’s animation Lunaricity. The work begins with a vision of the Moon encircled by a vast structure of solar panels harvesting energy from the sun. Framed as a speculative utopia, the project imagines alternative futures for energy production while challenging the imperial logic that has long shaped humanity’s relationship to territory, expansion and resource extraction. Yet it is difficult not to recognise a distinctly contemporary desire that underlies this vision: the promise of unlimited access to energy. Contemporary societies operate within a rhythm of continuous activity. Production, communication and the flow of information do not stop at sunset. In Fortin’s video, the Moon ceases to be a celestial body and becomes part of a global energy infrastructure.
In the monumental composition Wallpaper Fortin brings together two seemingly separate orders: the organic and the cosmic, the industrial and the technological. Fiery eruptions and flashes of lightning coexist alongside ventilation ducts, cables, fragments of industrial architecture and structures resembling technical installations. Through symmetry, everything is transformed into a kind of contemporary mandala in which infrastructure begins to resemble cosmology.
In Solar Sail, Fortin incorporates a video showing the Sun rotating on its axis. The projection is viewed through an open metal structure that recalls both a scientific instrument and a speculative model. The title refers to solar sails-spacecraft propulsion systems that harness the pressure of sunlight to travel through space without conventional fuel. Echoing this principle, the work draws attention to forms of movement and energy that depend not on extraction but on existing cosmic forces. The structure evokes centuries of attempts to describe and navigate the cosmos through mathematics and geometry, from early astronomical models to contemporary scientific visualisations. At the same time, the artist introduces a subtle sense of reversal. The star appears to rotate backwards, although this effect is merely an illusion produced by the perspective of an Earth-bound observer. The work gently unsettles the assumption that observation offers direct access to reality, reminding us that even the most familiar celestial phenomena remain dependent on the frameworks through which we perceive them.
Fortin’s cosmic imagination intersects with Jonathan Crary’s diagnosis of contemporary life. In 24/7, Crary describes a world that is permanently active, accessible and illuminated. A world in which night no longer marks the boundary between work, rest and recovery. Continuous activity becomes a product of capitalism, a system that seeks to exploit every moment while eliminating spaces of privacy, rest and sleep. Within this framework, night, sleep, and idleness become forms of resistance. Crary refers to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris as a metaphor for this condition. Constant exposure to light and prolonged isolation lead the scientists aboard the station to lose contact with both reality and themselves. “Visitors” appear, embodiments of memory and unresolved experience. For Crary, this is a figure of a culture without interruption, a world that has lost its capacity for regeneration. In a 24/7 reality, the ghosts of the past find no release because night, the time of forgetting and dreaming, no longer exists.
In Fortin’s work, fascination with the possibilities of technology is continually confronted with questions about the cost of expansion. Space does not appear as a territory free from earthly conflicts. It becomes another frontier onto which familiar mechanisms of extraction, exploitation and control are projected.
Amélie McKee examines a different aspect of the same reality. Her works evoke antennas, sensors and measuring devices, at times repurposing existing technologies and fabricating them entirely. They look as though they have been designed to capture signals arriving from elsewhere. Yet we never learn who is transmitting, what is being transmitted, or whether any transmission exists at all. The ambiguous nature of the processes truly at play sits at the centre of her practice.
Pillow Talk prods at an experiment left running unattended, as if something were being measured or monitored. At first glance, it resembles a technical observation station. A tripod-like device, a cable mysteriously buried inside a backpack, evokes a generator, a field computer or equipment used to record data. Every element suggests precision, with the lures and bobbins meticulously organised across the backpack’s repeating pockets, suggesting control and the possibility of measurement. In this sense, the work addresses the limits of perception. Not what we see, but how many processes unfold beyond our immediate experience. Technology becomes a kind of sensory prosthesis, a tool that alludes to contact with something distant or invisible.
At the same time, the work raises questions about the act of observation itself. Contemporary technologies do not simply help us register reality. Increasingly, they function as instruments of surveillance. We are constantly observed, tracked and analysed, often without knowing when it happens or through which devices. The most effective systems of control remain almost invisible. They hide within everyday objects, phones, computers, applications and communication networks. The apparatuses present in McKee’s work seem to oscillate between these two functions. They may serve understanding, but they may just as easily serve monitoring.
A similar tension appears in the PCB series: Microwave, Radiator and Television. McKee transforms antenna schematics into sculptural forms, etching actual circuit boards into blow-up flat antenna designs. Printed circuit boards usually remain invisible, hidden inside devices beneath protective casings. McKee brings them to the surface and presents them as aesthetic objects in their own right. Her works are small and require close attention, creating a sense of intimacy that contrasts with the spectacle typically associated with high-tech technologies. Copper surfaces, cables and metal brackets coexist with false eyelashes, subtle pastel colours and organic forms, among which tooth-like elements appear. This juxtaposition challenges conventional distinctions between the technological and the human, between what has been engineered to detect and measure and what organically senses and responds. As a result, technology ceases to function as an anonymous tool and begins to appear as something much closer to the body. Television in particular resembles a hybrid of sensor and eye. Eyelashes are among the most recognisable signs of human presence, closely associated with vision, perception and corporeality. McKee’s works can be read as attempts to imagine new forms of perception and sensitivity. She asks what might happen if electronics were no longer limited to communication and control, but instead became an extension of perception, something akin to an additional sensory organ. In this scenario, a cable begins to resemble a nerve, a circuit board becomes skin, and a sensor becomes an eye. The boundary between organism and machine becomes increasingly difficult to define.
Teledildonics makes explicit something that remains more subtle elsewhere in McKee’s practice: technology no longer serves only communication and information exchange. Increasingly, it mediates desire, intimacy and relationships. The term teledildonics refers to technologies that enable remote sexual experiences through electronic devices. It sounds futuristic, yet we already inhabit a world shaped by similar principles. Dating apps, messaging platforms, recommendation algorithms and internet-connected devices all contribute to a reality in which intimacy increasingly operates as part of a technological infrastructure. McKee is interested in the moment when the logic of optimisation enters the most private areas of life. If contemporary capitalism seeks to optimise work, communication, transport and production, why would it stop at sexuality? In her work, desire becomes another signal subject to transmission, regulation and processing.
These themes return in On Alignment. Combining archival footage, advertisements and amateur recordings with images of contemporary technologies, McKee traces a path from postwar technological optimism to a reality shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence. The film, made in collaboration with Melle Nieling, presents a world of constant information flow in which it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what constitutes an autonomous decision and what results from systems designed to predict and shape human behaviour. What happens to perception when more and more of reality reaches us through programmed systems? How do algorithms influence our choices, emotions and actions? And in a world saturated with information, are we still capable of distinguishing our own desires from those suggested to us?
Magnetic Fields is a story about different ways of visualising the invisible and about attempts to navigate a reality filled with signals that we cannot directly perceive and, at times, cannot fully decipher. For Fortin, these are forces that shape our cosmic and technological imagination; for McKee, they take the form of flows of information, relationships and communication systems that increasingly mediate our experience of the world. As we attempt to understand, record and interpret them, another question emerges: what is it that we are actually hoping to find on the other side? In Solaris, the answer is unexpected. We do not seek new worlds. We seek reflections of ourselves. For Fortin, outer space becomes a surface onto which we project earthly ambitions, desires and imaginaries. For McKee, a similar role is played by communication networks, algorithms and technologies designed to receive and transmit signals. Rather than revealing the world as it is, they often expose our own needs, anxieties and expectations. Both artists are interested in the moment when we realise that the world is far greater than the cognitive frameworks we have devised to understand it.
Curator: Katarzyna Piskorz
