In 2025 I curated Collapse of the Weave Function, a site-specific installation by the artistic collective Metahaven especially conceived for the Nave Una space at Matadero Madrid. It brought together Metahaven’s two-channel film Hometown (2018) and a series of textile works by the artists that have been commissioned for this occasion by Medialab Matadero. It was the latest in a series of exhibitions organised by Medialab to expand its ongoing research into emergent sociotechnical landscapes and innovative approaches to technological complexity.

Hometown

2018
31’, two-channel video, color, sound.

Filmed in Kyiv and Beirut in 2017, Hometown builds an imagined city through the two places, which never meet but become a unified landscape across the film’s two screens. Ghina and Lera, the protagonists, are the double of a single character. While they remain apart, taking turns in speaking, the film cracks open a visual and linguistic space that is more poetic than narrative. Images are resonances—indirect, suggestive, and polysemous. What should be ordinary becomes uncanny. Meanwhile, the digital network—abstract and intangible—is rendered in stubbornly physical terms: wires, heat, and “ancient soil.” Lera’s attempt to zoom and scroll through printed photographs of her and Ghina’s family shows the futility of retrieving clarity from the past. Rhythm, editing, and framing seem to emerge from the characters’ hand gestures, evoking touchscreen manipulation. Yet the screen they mimic doesn’t exist. Their movements appear to shape the cityscapes—as if trying to alter material reality through digital instinct. But these gestures fail to virtualize the physical. The world remains material. At times, the camera glides gently through Ghina’s Beirut neighborhood; at others, it jolts frantically, a surveillance feed tracking Lera as a ghost target in Kyiv’s Independence Square. The viewer is drawn into a fragmented landscape of tangled cables, rooftops, metal fences, and overgrown gardens. The two interwoven cities are cut through by a thin dividing line between the two channels. Ghina and Lera’s voices speak in contradictory, oxymoronic children's rhymes, musing about a murdered caterpillar, melting ice cream, and a melting glacier. In the years since its making, “Hometown” has acquired even more urgency, especially since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s renewed bellicose incursions into Lebanon. The film remains a solemn prayer about a hometown: a shared materiality of life, a stubborn presence of place, a capacity to imagine.

Collapse of the Weave Function

2025
jacquard weaving, ±10 x 3500 cm, cotton, wool, lurex

The work is a woven meditation on Schrödinger’s Cat, a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics involving a cat in a box. In the original version of the thought experiment, the cat is alive and dead at the same time (it is, so to speak, in superposition) until it is observed. In this version, it is awake and asleep at the same time, though we never know in advance what state we will find it, and in which, thus, the “weave function” will collapse. The work meditates on the fact that the visual cultures of 20th-century leftism, such as Atelier Populaire’s famous 1968 poster of a factory chimney, were based in classical mechanics. Collapse of the Weave Function asks what progressive visual languages might look like with new physics in mind. The textile work is an ultra-long, thin woven film strip spun rods across the entire exhibition space with horizontal rods between the columns. 

Vortices

2025
2 jacquard weavings, tapestries, 150 x 235 cm each, wool, cotton, polyester

This diptych of two large tapestries speaks to the experience of living in the present time, visualizing a sensation of struggle with a graphic language of patterns and elongated, cell-like figures. It draws on an earlier series of small weavings, Holding the Storm (2023), first exhibited at Asakusa, Tokyo. These works, in turn, were based on Versions and Waves (2020), which was themed around living in different “versions” of reality. In Vortices, the versions have finally collided into an inescapable urgency.

Centerless

2025
plastic bags, embroidery, pins, 500 x 300 cm

This new, large textile work presents an assemblage of yellow plastic bags found on flea markets and food markets embroidered with decentered patterns of shards and interfacial elements. 

About Metahaven

Metahaven is an Amsterdam-based artist collective whose work comprises filmmaking, design, and writing. Metahaven’s film works include The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) (2024), Chaos Theory (2021), Hometown (2018), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the European Film Awards), and The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) (2015). Metahaven have presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia, Kyiv; e-flux, New York, and State of Concept Athens, among others. They have participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; Ghost:2561, Bangkok, and many others. Their films have been screened at IFFR, Docs Against Gravity, CPH:DOX, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Their work is in several international museum and private collections, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Sharjah Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the V&A, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, affiliate researchers at Antikythera, and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at DAE.

Download Exhibition brochure

Public program (November 2025)

Attention: From Condition to Currency. Post-Screen Objects

Guided tours