Michel Platnic Curators: Hava Aldouby and Carmit Blumensohn
Michel Platnic's installation PostHum Condition: A Tribute to Guernica resonates with a disquieting sense of human vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of technologically induced disaster. A Tribute to Guernica is the fourth work in Platnic's moving image series PostHum Condition, following Children Playing (2023), Garden Muse (2023), and Tammuz (2024). The installation, comprising eight video works and four mechanically animated “robots," continues Platnic's sustained investigation into twenty-first-century existential concerns. Departing from the AI-driven explorations of the series' first three works, Platnic's current installment marks a return to manual craft and mechanical animation. This is further enhanced by real-time engagement with visitors through the integration of motion sensors and surveillance cameras.
In his sustained engagement with painting, both its material presence and its rich and complex art historical lineage, Platnic draws a powerful connection to Picasso's Guernica (1937). Here, the iconic work serves as a potent symbol of the horror and agony of war. Guernica, painted as a response to the Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, presents a cataclysmic moment where the human subject crosses paths with a devastating aspect of technological progress. In PostHum Condition: A Tribute to Guernica, Platnic focuses on the current moment in 2025, where the gradually thinning divide between humanity and technology seems to have finally been breached, ushering in a post-human era. Platnic taps into this ominous moment, using Picasso's painting as his point of entry into a techno-dystopian inquiry. Beyond the universal aspect of PostHum Condition, Platnic's invocation of Guernica at this particular moment in Israel's history bears a searing specificity to the October 7th massacre and its aftermath.
In A Tribute to Guernica, Platnic extracts individual figures from Picasso's composition: a dead baby; a horse neighing in agony; a small bird tilting its neck in pain; an open-mouthed dead man lying on the ground; a woman raising her hands in despair while another struggles through a window; a detached arm; and incongruously, a tiny flower – a speck of innocence planted by Picasso in this scene of death. By detaching these figures from the composition, Platnic grants each a space of individuality in which to subtly convey their helplessness and despair.
The figures and objects appearing in the videos are animated manually. Thus, the strings attached to the bird's wings and the baby's limbs are visible, along with the hands that work them. In turn, the four robotic objects presented in the gallery space are animated by servo motors. The baby turns its head, its eyes following the visitors, and the horse moves its limbs helplessly in midair. Platnic's figures return our gaze, whisper, or engage through motion as a way of immediate response.
Visually, the protagonists of PostHum Condition: A Tribute to Guernica lean towards the human rather than the posthuman, their low-tech composition and lack of technological flourish underscoring this distinction. And yet, Platnic perceives of them as robots, a term bearing distinct techno-dystopic connotations. They thus occupy an interstitial space between the human and the non-human. It is the artist's hands that visibly pull strings and levers to animate the bird and the flower, and we perceive a human tongue peering through the dead man's gaping silicon mask. The installation induces a sense of emotional immediacy, offering a deeply unsettling view of the pending threat to humanity posed by increasingly complex and potentially harmful human-created technologies.