The Taste of Infinity in a Mortal Mind
2021
Shown at Kunsthaus Langenthal
Never in the course of human history has science been this close to actually cracking the biological condition of life: death. Through the newest technologies and a better understanding of human and non-human bodies, therapies of reversing the aging process of important cells are being investigated and successfully tried out in animal experiments, hoping to soon be able to adapt those experiments to human biology.
The Taste of Infinity in a Mortal Mind shows the fictitious scenario of a company that offers and monetizes such therapies, enabling the patients to gain an infinite healthy lifetime. The questions the room-composition arises seem even more important today, given the circumstances it is being shown in: In the midst of a global pandemic, we are confronted with our very own vulnerability and temporality. The craving for a cure has rarely been so loud, and the feeling of losing important years of our lives leaves us paralyzed. The future has lost its clear shape and transformed into a volatile nebula; how tempting thus the idea of expanding our own life from one to all the lives that could ever be lived.
As seductive as immortality as a concept seems to be, it also leads us into the predicament that time and how we value it is inevitably connected to our finitude. If our time therefore suddenly expands into eternity, how does that affect how we not only value time, but also value life -human or non human- in general? Eventually, The Taste of infinity in a Mortal Mind not only dares to imagine the possibility of ending death, but also asks the inescapable question, which is not if, but who will actually be able to live forever.
