Aljoscha: Regnum Primigenium

ALJOSCHA

Regnum Primigenium

When the British naturalist John Hogg proposed a fourth kingdom of nature in 1860, alongside animals, plants and minerals, he created a place for the unclassifiable: for those infusoria, animalcula and zoophytes that eluded the taxonomy of his time. He called it Regnum Primigenium, the primordial kingdom of the first living beings. Aljoscha turns once again to the Protoctista, this time not as a retrospective gaze at the primordial soup of Earth's history, but as a hypothesis of synthetic evolution.

At the heart of the exhibition is an expansive, suspended installation composed of countless individually shaped and pigmented sculptures made of lightweight acrylic glass. The work has been conceived and assembled specifically for the space. Aljoscha envisions the Suppan gallery as a cradle of light, a historical Petri dish in which his biofacts proliferate. Translucent and vibrantly coloured, they spread like a superorganism of the ether, like a galaxy in statu nascendi. Their clarity and transparency generate reflections, a gentle mirroring that draws both the space and the viewer into the composition. Each form is unique and unrepeatable, each an individual in its own right; together, they constitute a superabundance, an excess reminiscent of the Gnostic concept of the Pleroma: a deluge of all possible forms.

Since 2009, Aljoscha has been developing Bioism, an artistic model of novel synthetic life forms at the intersection of art history and the life sciences. His synthetic organisms are not likenesses of existing things, but representations of ideas: alien-like, bizarre, unfamiliar and otherworldly. They appear as protists from an exobiology yet to be written, or as seeds of panspermia descended from distant celestial bodies. Their mutative character, their deviations, aberrations and anomalies point towards a nature in a state of palingenesis, of perpetual rebirth and transfiguration. Here, microcosm and macrocosm, monad and firmament converge.

The artist's thinking revolves around the biological revolution, synthetic biology, genetic adaptations and the question of how far human intervention in the creation of life should extend. Aljoscha draws on the concepts of Paradise Engineering and bioethical abolitionism, the vision of overcoming suffering in all sentient beings. His works are therefore both aesthetic and ethical propositions. They engage with bioethics and neuroethics, raising questions about consciousness and empathy, ethical boundaries and the well-being of future life forms. Situated between utopia and dystopia, they envision the terraforming of an inner world in which beauty and goodness become the highest state, the status supremus of a future super-being. Their divergence is not a heresy against nature, but a transgression in the service of bliss, a gentle hereticism of hope.

Formally, the works bear the imprint of hyperstructuralism: the complexity of living matter appears condensed into biostructural forms, uncannily ordered, as something astonishing born of proliferation and impossible laws. One might speak here of a superstructuralism in which the entelechy of each individual form, its inherent purpose, is subsumed into the larger whole. And yet everything remains delicate, fragile and ephemeral. Karl Bühler's concept of Funktionslust, the pleasure derived from the sheer act of functioning, aptly describes the vitality of these forms: they seem to exist for their own sake, in the pure delight of being.

Alongside the installation, Galerie Suppan presents individual sculptures that unfold the multiplicity of Bioism on a smaller scale, each an autonomous biofact in its own right. The star-scape paintings open up a view into the fixed-star firmament, the empyrean, and nebular fields from which new celestial bodies might emerge. They are complemented by meticulously detailed drawings composed of millions of individual dots. Each dot is a monad in the Leibnizian sense, a smallest living being, an animalculum that mirrors the universe within itself. From their unfathomable sum emerge structures of astonishing density, a cosmos of spontaneous generation on paper.

In this way, Regnum Primigenium connects Hogg's hypothesis of a primordial kingdom with a future that is still taking shape. The exhibition presents fluctuation and alteration, novelty and diversion as fundamental principles of life and synthetic evolution. It invites us not only to fear the unknown, but also to recognise it as a possibility.