Booth B7

Metropolitan Pavilion

125 W. 18th Street

New York, NY 10011

Stellarhighway is pleased to present Porous Holobionics, a solo booth of new and recent work by self-taught contemporary artist Manal Kara brought together for Outsider Art Fair 2023. The title of this presentation derives from a descriptor Kara has occasionally used for themself over the years. The concept of the holobiont extends a central organism, like a human being, to include the consortium of microorganisms in, on and around it.

Porous Holobionics includes a large "portal,” two artist books, two small sculptures made of foraged objects and multiple new ceramic works. Kara's portals, materially, transform photographs they produce into transfers on cloth that are then suspended by chain, wire or rope inside of a hand-built ceramic frame onto which Kara carves or applies text...poetry, phrases, advertisements, etc. I thought more about what you were asking, and like a fly, I landed (2021) depicts a pair of goats squaring off. Image pairings and sequences overlaying this duo are surrounded by watching eyes and metallic shuriken and generate the mise-en-scene of conflict/resolution. Praying Figure (2023), a slightly amorphous wall sculpture, includes detritus caught up in the kneeling figure’s heap of dark, metallic hair: a toy car; plastic bits; multiple grapevines; a shell; and, rusted, twisted metal. An animal’s jawbone completes the figure’s face. The humanoid cartoon rabbit in Life Stunts (2023) stretches oddly as it hefts five-hundred pounds with one strong arm from atop a moving car, tongue lolling and fully showing off. The wooden sculptures, Time Stick (2022) and Glomming on to the originary evil (2022), feel like the magical apparati of a future shaman approximating misunderstood technologies from times before theirs. Impugning what the artist views as a false dichotomy between the human and non-human, these seemingly incongruous objects function as field notes, guides, or maps to the artist's speculative ontologies.

This presentation also features two of Kara's artist books, the first of which, Coyote Poop Book (2018), consists primarily of digested animal fur found in coyote feces, washed clean by the rain and then collected, arranged and sealed into vinyl pages with polyester resin. The second book, Alien Sex Technologies (2018), is a leather-constructed, laser-cut, horsehair-bedecked interpretation of, as Kara puts it, "whatever 'sex' could possibly mean in an unknowable future." By playing with the form and concept of teledildonics, the name coined for virtual sex encounters using networked, electronic sex toys to mimic and extend human sexual interaction, Kara conjures page after page of queer futurist speculation across biological (and technological) classifications.

The works in Porous Holobionics exist as a potential future in which there is realization that humanity, Earth and the universe are already efficiently united in a symbiotic existence. Incorporating text, ceramic, fabric, plastic, fur, wood and metal, and utilizing different forms from "portal" to "book" to "functional object," Kara inscribes through these works a current condition and mimes a recognizable reality, but ultimately trades anthropocentric sovereignty for more delicate ruminations about understanding and being.