Adriana Ramić

David Peter Francis is pleased to present Beetle, a solo exhibition with Berlin-based artist Adriana Ramić. Ramić's multidisciplinary practice — influenced by machine learning, computational ephemera, non-human cognition, and linguistics — explores the proliferation of means by which we attempt to describe consciousness. Ramić's work, dwelling on memory and perception, often draws from systems of arranging information, in which images become a series, words take on a grammar, and life is grasped by means of its attributes. Estranged by her interventions, these studies gain other qualities as they err, models becoming exercises and accidents of form. What Ramić pursues is the strange remainders of these structures: precarious encounters with sentience we do not understand.

At the center of the exhibition is With respect to the body skeleton (2024), a 2-channel video projection featuring footage taken by the artist of leaf beetles crawling about white ginger lilies. The projection is contained within chambers made of dark glass, evoking the vitrines a natural history museum might use to display the beetles' carapaces, affixed by a pin. Across her body of work, Ramić returns to intermediaries that refract projected images; in this piece, previously shown at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the vitrines in their entirety are the reflective medium, scintillating with color as they refract the beetles' iridescence and motion across their surfaces.

The gallery itself, its windows tinted to match the chambers, has been made a vitrine, a process of recursion by which what is held in the boxes supersedes their frame. In a museum's display, the beetles would be frozen in death; here the vitrines are containers of suspended life. In unsettling proximity, we watch the beetles as they amble, chew, twitch. Under the microscope of the camera's gaze, we can almost make out something like the beetles' interior life, both alien and intimate. The beetles fly and fall, grasping tenuously onto petals, until their movement is arrested in periods of stillness, when we are left to stare at a moment of the beetles' inaccessible contemplation.

Elsewhere in the gallery is Unseen behavior (2024), featuring an array of collectible stickers which were included with chocolate bars by the Croatian manufacturer Kraš, each depicting a different species of animal. Their arrangement gives the impression of a diachronic sequence, a syntax emerging from their aleatory combination. The work gestures towards a taxonomy that would reduce the beetles to a sign in a symbolic order, but alongside the hyperreality of the vitrines, the works oscillate between the scientific and the aesthetic, the human and the other, representation and the real.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein carried out his own thought experiment with beetles, arguing that the language that we share falls short of making ourselves known. "Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle'," he wrote. "...Here it would be quite possible for every one to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing." Ramić's work engages with what, in experience, is this thing forever changing, this feeling without a name, this beetle without a pin.

—Will Weatherly

Adriana Ramić (b. 1989, Chicago) has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Autokomanda, Belgrade (2024); inge, New York (2022); lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA (2021); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2019); Kimberly-Klark, New York (2017); with a forthcoming solo exhibition at Switchboard, Berlin (2025). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024); Wschód Gallery, New York (2024); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2023); Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Stroom den Haag, The Hague (2019); Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2018); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2016); LUMA/ Westbau, Zürich (2015); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015). Ramić holds a BFA from the University of California San Diego.