Mi†ra presents nine-sum sorcery a collaborative project of Studio LABOUR, Hani Mojtahedy, Enes Güç, Zeynep Schilling, and Evelyn Bencicova.nine-sum sorcery premiered at Berlin Atonal 2019 as live audio-visual performance work, later adapted as a video piece for gallery exhibition and online setting.

nine-sum sorcery is an audio-visual piece composed of three chapters – The Wheel, Cyclone and Xerodrome. nine-sum sorcery draws inspiration from Reza Negarestani’s theory-fiction book “Cyclonopedia”, which imagines oil as a sentient being. nine-sum sorcery is a project initiated by studio LABOUR.

1st chapter

The Wheel

They lay deep, under the pressure of thousands of tons of earth and rock. Prehistoric organic matter accumulated beneath the ground. Pure energy that the earth had repressed down from a specific form to raw black energy juice.

Petroleum was formed as a tellurian entity, under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation. A typical, Oedipal case, then, a typical case of repression, welling up from the depth. It is insane with greed. It lends an inhuman proportion to our thirst.

(text from: Reza Negarestani – CYCLONOPEDIA: Complicity with Anonymous Materials)

Evelyn Bencicova (b. Bratislava, 1992) is a visual creative specialising in photography and art direction. Informed by her background in fine art and new media studies (University for Applied Arts, Vienna), Evelyn’s practice combines her interest in contemporary culture with academic research to create a unique aesthetic space in which the conceptual meets the visual.

Evelyn constructs compelling narrative scenarios that blur the lines between reality, memory and imagination “fictions based on truth”. Depicting multifaceted representations as illusions, Evelyn plays with the viewer’s perception to entice them into the labyrinth of her imagination. Her disturbingly beautiful visual language and washed-out colour palette, set within curiously symbolic environments, allow for a deep exploration of the themes that take her works and images far beyond what they reveal at first glance.

Collaboration repertoire includes cultural institutions such as Frieze, Royal Opera House,
Berghain, Kunsthalle Basel, National Portrait Gallery, Institute for Molecular Biotechnology and MQ Vienna. Evelyn's work was published in international art books, magazines (Vogue Portugal, Vogue Czechoslovakia, ZEIT Magazine, Dazed & Confused, i-D, Frieze, GUP, HANT, Metal etc) and exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. She also received numerous awards for
both photography and art-direction including Hasselblad Masters, Taylor Wessing Photography Portrait Prize, Portrait of Britain, Lens Culture award, Gomma Grant, Lens Culture and Berlin Masters 2020 to mention a few.

In 2019 Evelyn completed artistic residency in Mimic Studio which shifted her practice into more immersive and experimental forms of story-telling. Audio-visual work “Next time die consciously” (2018) and “nine sum-sorcery” (2019) were premiered at main stage of Atonal Berlin, MIRA (Barcelona) and Regenerations (Amsterdam). VR installation “Artificial Tears” was exhibited at Berlin Photo Week in Kraftwerk and Synthesis Gallery (Berlin). The work was also awarded by VR Art Prize scholarship by Deutsche Bank.