DYNAMICS OF EXTREMELY HIGH ENTROPY

DYNAMICS OF EXTREMELY HIGH ENTROPY is an exhibition featuring works by Maria Joranko, Michael Lye and 邊界_RG (Biānjiè Research Group), curated by COMEDY OF MENACE and shown at Nguyen Wahed, London.

The title, derived from the script of GATE-1, a “video-archive” by 邊界_RG, serendipitously serves as a fitting frame of inquiry into the practices of all three artists. Works on display all circle around tricky notions of entropy, machinic viscerality and mutation, undercutting essentialisms and instead reaching towards becomings characterized by radical change, oscillating between different degrees of entropy within and beyond each other.

In his doctoral thesis, Flatline Constructs, the late Mark Fisher diagnosed his Y2K contemporary (a cultural doom loop Fisherites would say we’ve never really left) as defined by the gothic flatline: “a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.” The anorganic life that defines cybernetic society - technics and materials that re-combine and mutate, that work iteratively and have no final end-point as they are in the world - haunts the “aliveness” of the (“human”) subject with a different “life” of its own, unfolding and changing in ways out of reach to “us.”

Following the entropic (un?)life of “mere things” becomes a metaphysical horror story on its own, chasing ever-changing creatures whose essences are ungraspable, thus unknowable, thus objects of fear. In GATE-1, a “potential organism” emerges within a digital sphere, writhing alively and jaggedly glitching, as a voice-over equal parts theoretical essay and prose poem describes its oscillating, unstable and visceral process of emergence into systems of signification. In Lye’s works, patinated steel sheets and black-painted timber planks are re-arranged throughout the exhibition period, re-negotiating their own formal aspects and re-inscribing themselves on the layout of the space itself. And in Joranko’s works, gothic aesthetics and subjects, especially the vampire, combine with industrial materials and techniques in sculptures that equally present cold precision, chaotic disruption and new forms of anorganically inspired vitality.

The exhibition will open with a Private View at Nguyen Wahed on 11 March from 6-9pm, and run until 18 March.

Michael Lye (2001, Narrm/Melbourne) is a Malaysian-Australian artist currently undertaking an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London. Lye’s practice interrogates spatiality and materiality as avenues into which territoriality and sociopolitical in/exclusion are revealed. His sculpturally founded practice presents otherwise “hard” materialities (especially steel) as expressions of imperial-industrial power, but through works that are fundamentally modular and re-arrangeable end up betraying their fragile foundations. He is a recipient of the RCA Presidents and Vice-Chancellors International Scholarship for the 2025/26 study year.

Maria Joranko (b. South Dakota, US) is a Guatemalan/American multidisciplinary artist based in London, holding an MFA in Fine Art with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London. Joranko creates sculptural installations, performances, video and sound through merging digital and craft methods. Deeply influenced by speculative fiction, storytelling, and the gothic, her oeuvre is characterized by a strong connection to the chthonic and political. She combines and remixes organic and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between virtual and material networks as sites for liberation. Joranko was the 2023 recipient of the Acme Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with shows i know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio, New York, and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She has also recently shown at Kupfer Projects and Studio Chapple (Feria Material 2025, Mexico City).
邊界_RG (Biānjiè Research Group) (biānjiè roughly translating to boundary, border or periphery) is an artist collective, research unit and publication platform working, in their own words, “at the edges of language, memory and machine cognition.” Founded by Ian Margo (2000, ES) and Alexandre Montserrat (2000, CN), their practice ranges from multimedia installations to research articles published with a wide range of collaborators. 邊界_RG operates within a framework equally Daoist, cybernetic and Bataillean, introducing viscerality and organicity to the often sterile spheres of emerging technologies. ​​Their work has been included in exhibitions such as Out There In Here, (ICA, London, 2024), Vertigo2, (Hyperplex Residency, Frontier Tower, San Francisco, 2025), ADAF, (Athens, 2025), RARE Accompart’s (on-chain exhibition, Objkt, 2025), and the OOT Festival (Riverside Studios, London, 2025). They have also screened works with Anticlone Gallery at Mandrake Theatre during Frieze Week, (London, 2023), the Internet Core congress, (Hangar.org with the Institute of Network Cultures, Barcelona, 2025), PrimeIntellect’s D.AI day (San Francisco, 2025), and Open Secret, (New York, 2025), among others. They are currently undertaking a 6-month residency at Sybil.gg, Berlin.
COMEDY OF MENACE is a London-based curatorial collective consisting of Orphée Kashala (1997, Lubumbashi), Adrian Preisler (2000, Copenhagen) and Aldo Zocca (2000, Copenhagen). Their methodological starting point unsettles the line between the sincere and humorous, productively drawing on pedantry and paranoia as a shakily stimulating curatorial position akin to a contemporary jester’s privilege. Kashala and Preisler are both enrolled in the MA Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art, while Zocca is undertaking an MA in Innovation at Central Saint Martins.
They are also friends in the way only potential future enemies can be.