The title of multidisciplinary artist Hady Sy’s latest exhibition is a contradiction before the first sculpture is even seen. In “Human Inc (Ascending Souls)”, he borrows the language of code, scale and efficiency, then unsettles it by hand. Ones and zeroes become bodies. Cold steel is bent out of shape and into roots, trees, angels, fish and families. A rigid material reveals its softer, feminine intelligence. Each figure is welded individually, while similar silhouettes gather, separate, hold hands, climb trunks, and spread into wings.
The exhibition appears to define, defend, and defy the – arguably shrinking – place assigned to humanity in the age of AI. Sy’s humans remain uncertain about what they may become, though never interchangeable. They carry the older intelligence of water, oxygen, roots, memory, and encounter. Through them, Sy seems to insist that the future must remain impossible to standardize.