Mimicry premiered on September 9, 2025, at Light Art Museum Budapest, within "More Than Human," the museum's fourth major exhibition, that run through July 2026.
Mimicry explores the hybridization of plants and insects through the lens of AI, imagining fantastical hybrid creatures born from horizontal gene transfer. Grounded in scientific research on how climate change and human activity are rapidly transforming Earth's biomes, the project simulates potential evolutionary trajectories, such as exaptation and mimicry, through which hypothetical species might adapt to a planet under pressure. Drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of "monsters," these hybrid beings act as liminal figures that challenge anthropocentric perspectives on nature, carrying traits from both the plant and insect kingdoms and reflecting on resilience, transformation, and new forms of coexistence.
At LAM, Mimicry takes the form of an immersive installation in a black box, where three walls become a single continuous surface. Hybrid organisms are projected across them at human scale, appearing and dissolving in a continuous loop, each carrying a genetic code tracing its taxonomic origins. At the center, a real-time data visualization maps the possible hybridizations across the biome transitions explored in the work. At recurring points, a single being expands to fill all three walls: a monumental encounter suspended in between times and regions.
Curated by Barnabás Bencsik and Borbála Szalai, the exhibition brings together nearly forty international artists to explore worlds where humans, animals, plants, fungi, and artificial entities are closely interwoven, inviting visitors to step outside a human-centered view of the planet and consider what shared, responsible coexistence with other species and systems might look like.
Mimicry fits naturally within this context, offering a speculative lens on plant-insect coexistence at a moment when ecosystems are being forced to adapt at unprecedented speed. The work was presented at LAM alongside artists including Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Yasuhiro Chida, Mat Collishaw, Wim van Egmond, Ólafur Elíasson, Balázs Ágoston Kiss, Kitty Kraus, MAEID, Guillaume Marmin, Erik Mátrai, Anthony McCall, Katja Novitskova, NONOTAK, Tony Oursler, Pamela Rosenkranz, Tomás Saraceno, and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, among others.
