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.

2nd chapter:

CYCLONE

Oil is an object of desire and the means of destruction. Narrative organizer, lubricant. A pipeline crawler. Hydrocarbon corpse-juice. Gives energy and destroys.

Decay builds without creation. It erases the distinction between soft and solid. Void excludes solid but solid must include void in order to survive. To ascend and to descend are both alike acts of opening, perpetuated through depth – the ambivalence of solid and void, the object and its outside. The ground begins to shift under our feet. All that is solid melts out from under us.

(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.