Oct. 31 — Feb. 03 / 2025
44-19 Purves Street
Long Island City, NY 11101

ASMA’s sculptural practice expands the possibilities of materials like silicone, resin, bronze, steel, and glass, creating hybrid works that merge artisan techniques with synthetic processes. Their research integrates concepts from literature, mythology, and fantasy with an exploration of the human condition and psychoaffective states, all framed through a metamodern lens.

In Ideal Space for Music, ASMA draws on the metaphorical capacity of SculptureCenter’s lower level as a place embodying the subconscious, opening a conversation around desire, fragmentation, and longing—concepts reflected in the exhibition’s title that point to an inherent impossibility. They explore this through the development of language and literature, using the concept of joint articulation and the symbol of ball-jointed dolls. In BJDs, the sphere becomes a place of contact, a point of conjunction and separation, simultaneously symbolizing the object of desire triangulating between a lover and the loved. For Sculpture Center, ASMA has sculpted low-relief cast aluminum spheres, depicting contorted figures dissected by curved lines. Other shapes reveal their musculature or are stretched and elongated—bodies, hands, legs, and feet become indistinguishable yet glow and reflect the viewer.

Adding to the newly commissioned metal spheres¹, ASMA creates a total environment with new stagings, paintings, a video, and soundscape. Dolls first appear through a drawing and photograph made by street vendors and found by chance by the artists in Mexico City. From here, the exhibition unfolds into a sequence of dramatic scenes featuring constructed figures that are all meticulously handcrafted and further the exploration of text, language, and symbolism. Combining found and reassembled pieces—many from prosthetic devices—with newly created elements like rounded joints and wired silicone hands, the dolls are given life-like movement and flexibility. They incorporate elements such as a clarinet for a leg, a sink faucet for a leg ligament, a dental impression tray as a foot, a bracket bonding device for the torso, cut hand orthoses for the thighs, and clothing made from used shirts, socks, and jeans.

The real, the imaginary and the symbolic, (B doll) engages with the tradition of still lifes and opens the emotional ambiance of the exhibition through its interplay with shadow and perception. This next scene is lightened by the small glass mouse at the foot of Sub, (D doll) whose prefix as title evokes words like subway, subconscious, subject, or submission, emphasizing sound associations and play with the lower-level space. Composer and composition, (C doll) reflects on the interaction between creator and creation while also being configured. Nude and the Staircase, (A Doll) invokes the romantic desire of the maker with references to Duchamp’s fragmented painting of the body. Building on earlier representations of dolls as sites of projection for ideas around sexuality, eroticism, and monstrosity linked to avant-garde artists like Hans Bellmer—who also drew on Lacan’s ideas around symbolism and language—ASMA’s works serve as avatars that revisit the Frankensteinian notion of disintegration. They evoke themes of contamination and hybridity in the process of self-becoming. 

The dolls are illuminated by a series of lamps similarly patchworked with found components, including glass cups and plates, a baking mold, magnifying glass, headlamps, flashlights, and other details that refract light and shadow. These fixtures also light a group of hand-finished calligraphic ink paintings that dissolve letters and text fragments drawn from sources that include psychological terminology, a 1913 text on Lotte Pritzel’s dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke, and prepositions in multiple languages. Breaking the point of composition, they also serve as vacant stage backdrops. Integrating all of the artworks is a soundscape, a new dimension in their work, collaged by ASMA from sounds collected over many years.

This auditory experience creates an atemporal atmosphere and ranges from melodic to dissonant. It includes classical music excerpts, distorted conversations, birdsongs, footsteps, water drops, and heartbeats. This dislodging of time is further developed through a new video work featuring the constructed dolls posing. It was filmed with a 16mm camera, hand-developed in black and white solarized stock, and then scanned and digitized. Representations of the fragmented body manifest as a response to the horror and perversion of human conflict during times of violence. ASMA’s exploration coincides with the current resurgence of dolls in popular culture, serving as a psychological space for coping with the contemporary nightmares of collective sorrow.