The second episode of the ⁠⁠Islands of Kinship (IOK) podcast contextualizes the show Of Yous by Luki Essender (Ilava, 1995), produced as one of the artwork commissions within the IOK project.

Of Yous was the artist’s first solo exhibition in Slovakia. It brought to bear the artist’s promiscuous practice, centering on performativity and language, to the scale of a sculptural installation. Essender approaches nature as queer, summoning a system of objects that constructs the semblance of place. Sculptural forms, architectural typologies, and visual cues are recast as a speculation, a hallucination – a world. Meticulous in its delineation, the exhibition revealed the artist’s process in navigating the threats and possibilities of a multitudinous self: autonomous, healing, and frozen in transition. The space that results is, in fact, against space.