Weaving together past series, the Avant L’Orage (“Before the Storm”) group exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce features Anicka Yi’s animatronic kelp pod sculptures amidst the stirrings of her algorithmic paintings. Presented by the Pinault Collection, the museum becomes an unlikely greenhouse for these distended spheres whose algal matter was formed by the heave of seashores. Now on land and continually gestating, they exist in a state of suspended animation—their humid, illuminated interiors teem and whirr with animatronic insects.

Yi’s artworks frequently invite us to rid ourselves of our anthropocentrism: if plant life can produce electronic beings, are humans still so crucial? "During this time, I was thinking deeply about how the category of 'human' was being disrupted", the artist explains. Through the fusion between nature and culture, through the refusal of those who installed an ineffective cooperation between the two, Anicka Yi invites us to think in terms of continuity rather than discontinuity.

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