A portal can be a physical or symbolic bridge over a liminal space, under which one may pass either unexpectedly on one’s way through the fractured landscape of possible futures, or with an adventurous intent, progressing dauntlessly to where semantic drift of the collective unconscious has decided to direct its flow, seemingly regardless of rhyme and reason.

The exhibition Test Portal allows the visitor a few curated entrances into such a state of affairs, seemingly inevitable and absurdly impossible at the same time – a set of mirrors within mirrors, reflecting on the onlooker both the despair and the whimsicality of their lost futures. In them, hauntological hellscapes of the deep  past become playgrounds where the creatures of “a future” glide over plains of magma smoothly like bubbly, bloated shapes inside a lava lamp.

The postmodern condition has bestowed the function of the ancient archetype of the portal almost uniquely upon the ever-present phenomenon of the Screen as both the force that pulls one through space-time, as well as the space-time one is pulled through by this force. Test Portal seeks to encase this formula in a veneer of (seeming) physicality. Screens and holograms presented here are not solely abstract phenomena – they are woven in a frame of tangible matter, which at the same time accrues on the outside of the screen or hologram and bleeds into the virtual reality they convey. The texture thus becomes the textual – the Test Portal as a Text Portal.