Daiga Grantina

The exhibition “The Mountain Guide” by Daiga Grantina features five abstract sculptures composed of found objects that together articulate a vision simultaneously poetic and disturbingly uncanny. The individual works consist of complex striations in which transparent and metal materials, melted plastic, and cables are woven together until they start to resemble organic forms while taking on other, alien, futuristic qualities.

Here and there, elements emerge that breathe life into the bizarre shapes. In I source D (all works 2015), for instance, red cables and wires run through a figure as if they were pumping blood through its body. A work lying on the floor, titled PF—also known as Path-Finder in the exhibition’s accompanying pamphlet—is a cocoon-like formation that, like an ouroboros, bites its own tail. This is reminiscent of how, in analytical psychology, the iconography of “self-consuming” serves as a metaphor for the early development phase of childhood in which no conscious differentiation between inner and outer worlds has been learned, and also no gender identity is yet assumed. The piece hanging on the wall, Realm of Desire, takes this thought further. Based on a treatise by psychologists Alfred Kind and Curt Moreck, “Morphology, Physiology and the Sexual-Psychological Significance of the Secondary Gender Characteristics of the Female,” this work hints at an examination of a female history of sexuality and the erotic. Characteristic of the whole show, Grantina sketches a visual landscape that, by way of a multilayered analogy, opens out into an eruption of psychological moments.

Translated from German by Diana Reese