Inside the octagon of Schinkel Pavillon sits a talking android of masculine appearance. It is a hybrid between machine and doll, resembling a human being in physiognomy and behaviour. Through what it directs towards the entering audience in its speech, it links social realities and fictions. It is a speech about the beginning and end of human existence, a plea to be humane and at the same time to overcome being human. In its statements it revolves around the human being in its extremes between creation, love, peace, unity – faith – fear, aggression, and total destruction through terror and war, as well as global collapse.

In the second part of her double-exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon, ‘Now this, is this the end…the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?’, Goshka Macuga focuses on the relationship between human beings and technology. The android with the title “To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll“ (2016) works as an interface between a narrative of artificiality and the human perspective. The artist prioritises in her work the generation of knowledge through language, rhetoric and intellectual exchange as a tool of human cognition. In both exhibitions, the overcoming of the human body through work on artificial memory and artificial intelligence is a topic that the artist negotiates and puts up for discussion. The first part of the exhibition implied – among reflections on beginning and end – also the course of time as a factor as well as materiality within the production of knowledge and within knowledge engineering. While in the first part Macuga focused on the organisation, operability and loss of knowledge, now the production of cognition is emphasised.

Goshka Macuga was born 1967 in Warsaw and lives and works in London.