FW Spotlight: Top Submissions of March
As we move through the works of Sakul, Ramić, and Wolfryd, we find a recurring tension, one that dissolves and reassembles itself in different forms. Time crumbles like a weathered wall, knowledge fractures into arbitrary classifications, and art history becomes a network of interchangeable assets.
We live in an era where every image is already a simulacrum, every object a commodity, every memory an illusion drifting like smoke. And yet, within this instability, new possibilities emerge: art as process, as friction between order and entropy, as an ever-unfolding negotiation between past and future.
One question remains: in this constant slippage between the real and the represented, the lived and the cataloged, the historical and the speculative—where does our experience of art truly reside?
This month, three exhibitions lead us through the shifting boundaries of reality and illusion, order and chaos, memory and simulacrum. Kanrec Sakul dissolves matter into ephemeral smoke, while Adriana Ramić invites us to observe the world through the perspective of a beetle, hinting at the impossibility of fully grasping nonhuman consciousness. Finally, Marek Wolfryd exposes art as an archive of stacked symbols, a commodity adrift in the tides of globalization.
In each of these projects, perception is destabilized: time unravels, images fragment, and reality itself is revealed as a precarious construct, shaped by the forces of memory, technology, and the market.
Sukera Fumo – The Dissolving Matter
Sukera Fumo by Kanrec Sakul, exhibition design by Niki Bernath, at VUNU, Košice, 19/02/2025.
In Kanrec Sakul’s language, smoke is not merely a physical phenomenon but a metaphor for instability, for an endless transformation that defies rational containment. Here, painting is no longer an immaculate surface but a skin marked by time, a visual fabric inscribed with the traces of erosion.
In the monochromatic world of Sukera Fumo, forms emerge and vanish like spectral presences. Indistinct creatures surface only to dissolve again, suggesting an interstitial realm where the boundary between body and environment evaporates. Memory, in this uncertain space, disintegrates into fragments, like ashes carried by the wind.
If Velura Rando (2024) still allowed for a range of subtle hues, here color is reduced to pure contrast between light and shadow, between presence and absence. Time is no longer a linear progression but a process of corrosion, a silent force that wears away the surface until it becomes transparent. Sakul forces us to see time not as a forward motion but as a slow dissolution: what was once solid turns to smoke, and what is smoke is already a memory.
[Beetle] – The Language of Insects and the Void of Meaning
Adriana Ramić | David Peter Francis, New York | 26/02/2025 – 22/03/2025
At the heart of Adriana Ramić’s exhibition lies a paradox: we observe beetles through glass screens, yet we can never truly comprehend them. Like Wittgenstein’s famous thought experiment, where each person has a “beetle in a box” but no one can know if it’s the same beetle, Ramić questions the limits of shared perception.
The video piece With respect to the body skeleton (2024) presents a hyperrealist microcosm: beetles crawl across white ginger lilies, their iridescent shells reflecting in dark vitrines. They are alive yet inaccessible, suspended between scientific observation and total abstraction. The gallery’s windows, tinted to match the projection chambers, extend this recursive structure, transforming the entire space into a vitrine, an enclosure for something both present and unknowable.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Unseen behavior (2024) introduces another form of cataloging: collectible animal stickers, once included with Croatian chocolate bars, arranged in a sequence that mimics taxonomic classification. But what kind of order is being imposed here? Ramić exposes the arbitrariness of our systems of knowledge, showing how our attempts to name and categorize the natural world ultimately reveal more about our own limitations than about the creatures we seek to define.
What separates an image of a beetle from a real beetle? At what point does representation become more “real” than reality?
In the end, Ramić leaves us with uncertainty: language itself is a closed box. We can name things, but we can never truly possess them. The beetle remains unpinned, free, yet forever elusive.
Occidenterie – The West as Simulacrum
Marek Wolfryd | General Expenses, Mexico City | 03/02/2025 – 22/03/2025
If chinoiserie was the West’s reimagining of the East, molded to satisfy its own fantasies, then occidenterie, as Marek Wolfryd envisions it, is an act of reversal: what happens when the West itself is broken down and reassembled as an exotic object?
Wolfryd transforms art into an accumulation of histories: stacked styles, epochs, and materials collapse into dense, stratified compositions. His works function as compressed archives, a synthesis of Western art history reconfigured as commodity.
Here, art is no longer a sacred object but a speculative product, an asset subject to the same economic forces that govern the global market. Wolfryd’s pieces layer references like an algorithm repeating visual patterns: a Twombly-like scribble, a Maoist icon, a 3D-printed texture, all fused into a single surface, as if art history were nothing more than a database of interchangeable components.
Like a financial market in constant flux, Wolfryd’s work exposes the artificiality of artistic value: authenticity, uniqueness, and historical specificity dissolve into pure contingency. Art is not a linear progression but an accumulation of signs, endlessly reshuffled, repackaged, and monetized.
What remains of art in this landscape? Wolfryd suggests that perhaps art has always been this: a system of floating symbols, ready to be recoded, resold, and repurposed. The West, in his hands, is not a stable concept but a distorted reflection, endlessly reconfigured for the next global transaction.
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Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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