Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts, Austria Pavilion

Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl will represent the Austria Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale with their exhibition, Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts. The exhibition, curated by Karola Kraus, is inspired by William Burroughs’ eponymous cut-up novel, in which he described the human body as a “soft machine” constantly besieged “by a vast, hungry host of parasites.” Knebl and Scheirl transform the Pavilion into an open stage for paintings, sculptures and photographs, textile works, writing, video, a fashion collection and a magazine to materialize in the form of an exhibition “soft machine” whose individual parts merge into an organic, living whole of art, performance, design, fashion and architecture. The artists playfully and critically interrogate the morphing of Burroughs’ “soft machine”  into a cyborg-age body cipher.