Cleave is a liminal act of mourning for the unseen landscape of our collective wounds. The installation is in a twofold state; while it delineates the healing nature of ritual, the actual experience of the installation itself could be, with its kinetic wails and fleshy artificial appendages, traumatic. At the same time, there is uncanny whimsy in the humanoid robotics feeling our emotions for us. 

The passage of time causes ruptures in the reprocessing of memories, and the constellation of Cleave mirrors this; whilst identifiable through their constituent parts, the heaped bodies, flailing limbs and cut flowers that litter the installations circle are now deconstructed detritus. Trauma is not entropic, it lingers in the recursive redoubled helixes of our DNA, but the warped appendages of memory that they travel through are indelibly strained. Designed to wail the averaged out notes of different people in Ostrowicz's family, the water whistles are programmed to rock on a motor when they hear room chatter, spluttering wails through the funnel in the water-filled instruments.

Emergent computational design designed and developed by Mick Geerits.

Photographs by Alicja Kielan and Wojciech Chrubasik courtesy of Galerie Op Enheim, Wrocław