Apparatus Pinokis

‘Apparatus Pinokis’, by Kristaps Ancāns and Marc Hulson, is the latest in a series of their collaborative sculptural works.

A dense aggregate of enigmatic structures is arranged within the vitrine-like frame of Apiece gallery, combining industrial steel elements, kinetic components, and found domestic furniture into a quasi-abstract diorama reminiscent of a cluttered inventor’s or magician’s workshop. Populated by hybrid effigies—handcrafted wooden objects that reference the human form while resembling oversized toys or balloons—the installation evokes a minimalist, mechanised puppet theatre. An implied narrative unfolds, yet it remains unclear whether something is being dismantled or assembled: an automaton under construction, or the autopsy of a puppet. The exhibition title, echoing the archetype of Pinokis (Pinocchio), revisits paradigms of an object becoming a subject.

Referencing the uncanny animation of everyday objects in Surrealist film, the work alludes to post-human anxieties surrounding the contemporary position of the human body amid the relentless accumulation of new technologies and the unsettling emergence of thinking machines. Drawing on the ambivalent dynamic between artificial life and concepts of the human in speculative fiction, ‘Apparatus Pinokis’ stages questions of subjective agency, selfhood, consciousness, and functionality in relation to the escalating psycho-affective pressures of our era.

Within the installation, it becomes increasingly unclear who acts and who is acted upon. The distinction between the operator and the operated begins to dissolve: is the machine merely a tool, or does it assume the role of an actor? As Bruno Latour suggests, agency need not be attributed exclusively to humans; objects, too, participate in and transform networks of relations. In this sense, the installation does not simply represent post-human dynamics—it materially enacts them.

At a time when artificial intelligence increasingly permeates everyday life, the exhibition confronts the unstable boundary between fabrication and autonomy, construction and consciousness, inviting viewers to reconsider the shifting locus of agency in a world where the human no longer occupies the unquestioned centre of action.

• Organisation