Text by CLOT Magazine
Isabel Lewis is a Berlin-based artist whose career began in the context of contemporary dance. Still, in recent years her works have broken with the limitations of a single mode of presentation and are hybrid forms involving lecture, movement, music, food, smell and more. Until November 8, 2020, Lewis presents Scalable Skeletal Escalator, a live artwork and a shared research site within which the complexity of the concept of the body and its history is parsed.
The exhibition space offers a field for experimentation, reflection, speculation and transformation of the body. Taking inspiration from evolutionary biologist Dr Lynn Margulis’ emphasis on cooperative and symbiotic relationships between species as the driving force of evolution, Scalable Skeletal Escalator is an experimental live artwork conceived in the form of a holobiont, like the human body itself.
Scalable Skeletal Escalator occupies three levels of Kunsthalle Zürich, and different atmospheres can be encountered on each. The music is created by LABOUR, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy created the paintings on canvas and artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas created the smells in the basement of Löwenbräukun, dancers’ costumes are from Marcelo Alcaide and Yolanda Zobel, and Dirk Bell and Mo Stern created a custom-made speaker system. Lara Dâmaso, The Field, Rafał Pierzyński and Mathias Ringgenberg are the dancers
Scalable Skeletal Escalator runs until November 8, 2020.
