Adriana Ramić, [Beetle] at David Peter Francis, New York

[Beetle] by Adriana Ramić, at David Peter Francis, New York, NY, USA, 26/02/2025 – 22/03/2025.

Exhibition Text:

David Peter Francis is pleased to present [Beetle], a solo exhibition with Berlin-based artist Adriana Ramić. Ramić’s multidisciplinary practice—drawing from machine learning, computational ephemera, nonhuman cognition, and linguistics—explores the proliferation of means by which we attempt to describe consciousness. Her work, dwelling on memory and perception, frequently engages with systems of ordering information, in which images form sequences, words construct grammars, and life is categorized through its attributes. As these systems shift through her interventions, they generate new, uncertain qualities—models becoming exercises, accidents of form emerging as alternate structures of meaning.

At the center of the exhibition is With respect to the body skeleton (2024), a two-channel video projection featuring footage of leaf beetles crawling over white ginger lilies, filmed by the artist. The projection is contained within dark glass chambers, reminiscent of the vitrines used in natural history museums to display pinned beetle specimens. Ramić, however, inverts this logic: rather than preserving the beetles in death, these vitrines become containers of suspended life. The gallery’s windows are tinted to match the projection chambers, extending this recursive structure—the entire space transformed into a vitrine. As the iridescence of the beetles refracts across the glass, their movement oscillates between hyperreal clarity and abstraction. Under the close gaze of the camera, we observe their ambling, twitching, and stillness—moments that suggest an inaccessible interior world, both alien and strangely familiar.

Elsewhere in the gallery, Unseen behavior (2024) presents an array of collectible animal stickers once included with chocolate bars by the Croatian manufacturer Kraš. Arranged as if forming a sequence, the stickers evoke a taxonomic impulse—a desire to encode and classify the nonhuman world into symbolic orders. Yet, in dialogue with the hyperreality of the vitrines, the exhibition unsettles distinctions between the scientific and the aesthetic, the human and the other, representation and the real.

Ramić’s [Beetle] engages with the limits of language and perception, recalling Wittgenstein’s thought experiment in Philosophical Investigations: “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’… Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box.” Through her work, Ramić gestures toward what is forever shifting, a presence beyond description—a beetle without a pin.

— Will Weatherly