Ben Shirken, H.D. Reliquary at Intercomm, Ridgewood

“H.D. Reliquary” by Ben Shirken, curated by John Pugh, at Intercomm, Ridgewood, 4/10/2025 – 4/25/2025.

Exhibition Text:
H.D. Reliquary is the first eponymous full length from Queens-based artist, musician, and 29 Speedway label owner Ben Shirken [a.k.a. Ex Wiish]. The record will be released alongside a multimedia installation in collaboration with Studio ZM, Muein, Duncan Davies at Intercomm, running from April 10 – April 20. The title references the hard drive as a sacred container for relics, contemplating how digitally archived fragments of one’s existence can burn eternally after death. Archives, and in this case recordings, splinter and warp. Some distort what they contain. Some vanish, and others are eternally preserved, immune to deletion. Your information on these digital drives becomes a residue, what survives the remnants of collaboration. H.D. Reliquary brings the ancient act of enshrining holy bodies into the present using practices of sociotechnical intervention: the technical object itself becomes the architecture of a sanctuary. The Reliquary stands as a fixture of transcendental time. A secular-sacred vessel–not of holy blood–but of archival shrapnel and the traces of information. In a historical moment hallmarked by democratic dissolution and decaying institutions, we seek containers for contemplation. Not for dogma, but for meditation: a media of revelation. Informatic illustrations peel back time. A cybernetic temple endeavors to braid bit with photon–our fastest systems available–to create a rupture in billions of years of deep time. How? Computerized and X-ray Tomography scans of organic artifacts ranging from human bodies to quantum particles, fossils to batteries. Noospheric representational structures appear through Gaian realism–patterns of interdependence–in deep meditation. This becomes a visceral layer for an integrated, sympoetic awakening.