Water—the source of life, a vital part of our bodies, alterable, and yet always present. This most original of all elements is the basis of the performance that is shown in the film Jellyfish by Maryna Makarenko. Water’s indeterminable form and wealth of variants symbolize the existing gender fluidity of our society.
The markedly calm video imbued in blue light shows several persons moving about in a water basin, each at their own speed, repeatedly touching and harmoniously interacting with each other. The sound track features 25 different statements from interviews on the subjective experiences of perceiving one’s own gender, interwoven with atmospheric music. Due to the multifacetedness of these perceptions, the speakers implicitly demand that society should abandon binary gender categories, while also outlining the possible consequences of such an utopia.
In addition to the metaphorical and pictorial level that lets the notion and alteration of one’s gender appear just as natural and limitless as water, Makarenko also allows the viewers to experience its harmonious undulations on a technological level. Not only Lukas Grundmann’s atmospheric music underscores this flowing mood, but also the combination of picture and sound track. The effect is achieved not least by the fact that the two tracks are slightly offset. It is precisely at the points where image and sound approach each other that the demand to liberate oneself from existing categories comes clearly to the fore. These moments in which the performers almost synchronously repeat the voiceover statements show to what extent current recipients may perhaps lack openness.
The work Jellyfish was continued and further developed by the sound performance Tuning of the World. During and after the film presentation, sounds recorded by a hydrophone, sounds generated for scientific purposes, and live sounds of, with, and through water are com- bined to form an ambient soundscape.

Lena Hortian

Artist Statement
An urge for a deeper understanding of human psyche is a catalisator for my art practice.
Taking a role of visual psychoanalyst I put others on a “psychiatrist couch” to gather experiences, histories, visions and dreams into collective narrative of contemporaneity.
I see lots of parallels between being an artist and being a therapist, a healer. I look at my work from the perspective of qualities. Which qualities it carries? How it will impact others and me, afterwards, and while working on it. Melding together dance, performance and moving picture I investigate technologisation of “self”, our physicalities and subjectivities. How emotions are controlled by technologies, digital and chemical. With documental approach in Jellyfish I talk about gender and technologies rearranging stories into fiction. Deviating binary notions of gender to crystalize the invisible and hidden.

Maryna Makarenko