BIANCA HLYWAMute Track

Mute Track is a solo exhibition by artist Bianca Hlywa. The exhibition features an installation with kinetically moving SCOBYs (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast).

SCOBY slowly grows in layers on top of the fermenting health beverage Kombucha, eventually becoming a fleshy, beige, wet, pungent and thick microbial mat. Mute Track’s versions have grown over the last ten months. They weigh 110 kilos and are shaped like a triangle, 180 cm long and 120 cm at the widest point. The SCOBYs are sewn to webbing structures which are attached to rotating industrial motors supported by a scaffold tower.

The exhibition consists of a simple choreography. Starting from a resting position, the rotating motors gradually increase speed: the SCOBYs go from a slow circling to a faster movement that begin to stretch out their fleshy forms. At 8 miles per hour, the SCOBY's appears to be flipping, from front to back. After stopping, the action begins again and is on loop during the exhibition.

As the exhibition progresses, the materiality of the SCOBY will change. The constant movement will bring tears and over time and the SCOBY will become more dry and dark. There is a tension between their organic, fragile bodies and the robust metal mechanism that threatens to rip the SCOBY apart.

Bianca Hlywa's (Canada, 1992) interdisciplinary practice emerges from an analysis of a cultural infrastructure defined by polarities inherited from modernity: life/non-life, good/bad, and artificial/natural. Her work seeks to make visible the ways in which these notions have shaped the norms of contemporary politics and aesthetics. This is done by challenging them using a visceral and curious materiality: oftentimes, SCOBY (Symbiotic Cultures Of Bacterial Yeast), grown to enormous proportions.