Spit and Image marks the first solo exhibition in China by the artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. This debut brings together their most significant work and their newest pieces. The title, while originally signifying “perfect likeness,” is here expanded to suggest a nuanced doubleness—one that creates polyphonic and polyporous dimensions within a seemingly repetitive and mirrored structure. The space of MACA is transformed into an ambiguous zone of liminality, in which perceptual boundaries dissolve into a site of superimposition, entanglement, and chaos. Self and doppelgänger, body and technology, real and virtual, scent and mist, membrane and screen: as various materialities and temporalities permeate and traverse this realm, a speculative contemporary hauntology emerges.
The artists position their Slavic and Baltic cultural background within a vision of “ancestrality”: instead of indulging nostalgia, they endeavor to reactivate marginalized, non-modern subjectivities through re-choreographed forms. Central to this constellation is the figure of the upiór, a vampire possessing dual souls, an Other lingering between life and death, human and non-human, which carries the whispering of the marginalized and nameless, embracing the fluid identities and multiple possibilities of narratives.
In this sense, Spit and Image manifests a complex state of in-betweenness. On the first floor, Enclosure (The Double Dream of Spring) (I-XXVIII) (2025) takes the Enclosure Movement as a historical reference, where veiled organza overlaps digital prints to construct boundaries at once present and precarious, evoking a metaphorical resonance between land privatization histories and the process of provatization in digital spaces. As the viewers step into a field of phantasmal “membranes,” their very beings diffuse into the “filters” constructed by technical images. Meanwhile, in Yield (twinning) (2025), the viewers confront their own sharp reflections in stainless steel flower mirrors. Disturbingly, these nostalgic objects, which are derived from a plastic make-up mirror once-ubiquitous in Eastern Europe, now function as surveillance cameras that rigidly scrutinize the viewers who dare to come near—as if the flowers were performing a paradoxical dynamic of gazing and being gazed at, or offering sensorial testimony to the historical rupture between Nature and Culture, and Self and Environment.
On the second floor, Spit and Image 1 (2025) and Spit and Image 2 (2025) demonstrate how double and in-betweenness operate as strategies of “overcoming.” The corporeal distortions and metamorphoses may evoke a new trance-like experience—one that seeks to reclaim agency and sovereignty from the domination of algorithms and capital. A monstrous body rises to combat an equally uncanny reality, a fragmented self resists the controllable and replicable life, a radical doppelgänger dissolves institutionalized identities and morphs into a Frankensteinian hybrid of supernatural and technology—an object of terror and worship at once. This strategy achieves its most diffuse expression through the fragrance installation Mirror Mirror (2025), which spans both floors: two mirrored fragrances permeate the body through rhythmic breathing, thus “infecting” life, and transforming it into an embodied medium at the molecular level that overcomes all enforced dualisms.
The cosmology of Spit and Image is precisely grounded in this dialectical openness, merging into a diffuse constellation in which witchcraft coexists with algorithms and horror dwells with poetry, while specters of the past resonate with projections of the future in a labyrinth of mirrors, mist, membranes, and scents. Instead of offering a simple answer, the artists strive to create an unceasing fluxion, a promise of ever-renewing transformation, and a persistent yet unstable site of perception anchored in the turbulent flow of uncertainty.
Spit and Image is curated by MACA Director Yang Beichen, with co-curating and execution by MACA Associate Curators Wang Jianan and Yang Li. Special thanks to Pro Helvetia Shanghai, the Swiss Arts Council, for their generous support of the exhibition, and to 432PERFUME for their support of the fragrance installation.
Opening conversation: September 7, 2–4pm
Speakers: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Chen Tianqi, Yang Beichen, Shanyu Zhong