EXHIBITION OPENING | Desire Is a Machine, Breathform, Delivery Dancer's Sphere

Celebrate the opening of the third quarter of our fiftieth-anniversary artistic program. Our new shows navigate schizoanalysis, hybridisation of the human and the machine, and cyberfeminism.

Curated by Institute of Modern Art Adjunct Curator Stephanie Berlangieri, Desire Is a Machine brings together artists who understand desire not as a lack to be fulfilled but as a generative, machinic force coursing through all life. The artists engage with the legacy of schizoanalysis by reorienting how mental health is understood, foregrounding connections between living beings, technologies and other entities, and conceptualising the flows of capital and information. The exhibition shifts focus from the individual psyche to the collective and relational, affirming desire’s capacity to disrupt, reimagine, and reorganise the world.

2025 recipient of the Jeremy Hynes Award, Max Athans will present their first institutional show Breathform at the Institute of Modern Art. Confusing and uncanny, intriguing and repellent, Max Athans‘s 3D-printed sound sculptures hybridise human and animal, doll, and machine.

The screening room will host Ayoung Kim's cyberfeminist multidimensional speculative fiction, Delivery Dancer's Sphere. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the gig economy and platform labour intensified in South Korea, the video probes the accelerationist urge for body and time optimisation. The video centres on two female drivers, Ernst Mo and En Storm who elegantly navigate their never-ending delivery work under the control of a master algorithm called Dancemaster. Blending 3D animation with live-action sequences, Kim creates a hyperreality that challenges the perceived 'truths' of this world.

Image: Pedro França and Ueinzz Theatre Company 'Archichroma (New Romanticisms for Somber Times)' 2017.