BALANCE DEPENDENCY
Vienna, Austria 2026
Curved iron
Art Installation for the group show Fishy Business
Photo by Nacho Errando
At Waf gallery Klima Biennale
Curated by Carmen Lael Hines and Lisa Jäger
Fishy Business: Hydromorphologies and Wetware explores aquatic prostheses as epistemic and spatial tools. Bringing together art, architecture, biology, and myth, the exhibition asks how prosthetic interventions reshape interspecies care, ethics and cohabitation. Curated by Carmen Lael Hines and Lisa Jäger, it features works by Agnes Questionmark, Andreia Santana, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Elena Rocabert, Nikolaus Eckhard and Christina Gruber, using prosthesis to imagine alternative ontologies of care.
The project explores forms of bodily amplification afforded by designed, architectural components. This approach is inspired by technologies of aquatic spectacle in aquariums, where space is used to stage nature as a synthetic experience. Prosthesis, in this context, is approached as a means of thinking through the mechanics and politics of extension—namely, the extension of the human body and its sensory capacities through interactions with technology. In turn, this destabilizes the conception of nature as something detached from technology. In aquariums, nature is constructed through the mechanics of spectacle and is therefore prosthetic in character.
The project draws on three lines of inquiry: spatial, sensorial, and bodily. The first is grounded in a close analysis of the logistical mechanisms of the Haus des Meeres, an anti-aircraft structure from the Second World War that has been transformed into an aquarium, where more than 10,000 organisms coexist under strictly controlled conditions: light, circulation, temperature, and feeding regimes that simulate a hydro-ecosystem. The aquarium operates as a surveilled stage, where fish are rendered as productive, performative actors.
Lighting is essential to this stage. Without it, the spectacle of fish cannot be sustained. Organisms become disoriented, biological and reproductive rhythms are disrupted, and the ecosystem collapses; in this sense, lighting functions as a spatial prosthesis. In the gallery, recreated aquarium lighting simulates the systems used in aquariums to regulate photosynthesis and biological rhythms. Each light has been constructed from repurposed aquarium materials collected in Madrid and Vienna, reorganized into a modular system adaptable to the space.
The suspended floating devices act as architectural prostheses for the body, reproducing in air the logics of balance and support that water exerts on organisms. They extend the capacities of human-limbs, and nod to a hydro-morphological understanding of humans adopting the mobilities of fish. By transferring these infrastructures into the gallery space, light and bodily suspension combine to construct an artificial ecosystem in which the rules of care, control, and circulation that sustain aquatic environments are translated into architecture, geometry, and spatial organization.
In this way, light, structure, and movement configure an artificial scenography where perception and circulation are intertwined, inviting us to question how we inhabit, observe, and sustain constructed spaces.
Body and light are approached as material construction technologies, where humans continually interact with the mechanics of the aquatic stage.
