Private View: 11th March, 6–9 pm
116 Upper Street, N1 1AB London
Curated by Comedy Of Menace, DYNAMICS OF EXTREMELY HIGH ENTROPY debuts at Nguyen Wahed, London, showcasing the works of artists Maria Joranko, Michael Lye, and Ian Margo.
The title, derived from the script of GATE-1, a “video-archive” by Margo, serendipitously serves as a fitting inquiry into the practices of all three artists. Works on display circle around entropy, machinic viscerality, and mutation, undercutting essentialisms and instead reaching towards becomings characterized by radical change. It’s what Mark Fisher called the gothic flatline: where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive. This anorganic life, technics and materials recombining and mutating with no final end point, haunts the “human” subject with a “life” of its own, unfolding and changing in ways out of reach to “us.”
In GATE-1, a “potential organism” emerges within a digital sphere, writhing alively and jaggedly glitching, as a voice-over equally theory and prose poem describes its oscillating, unstable, and visceral process of emergence into systems of signification. In Lye’s works, patinated steel surfaces and black-painted timber planks are rearranged throughout the exhibition period, renegotiating their formal aspects and reinscribing themselves onto the layout of the space itself. And in Joranko’s works, gothic aesthetics and subjects, especially the vampire, combine with industrial materials and techniques in sculptures that present cold precision, chaotic disruption, and new forms of an anorganic-inspired vitality.
About the artists:
Maria Joranko (b. South Dakota, US) is a Guatemalan/American multidisciplinary artist based in London, holding an MFA in Fine Art with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London. Joranko creates sculptural installations, performances, video, and sound through merging digital and traditional sculpture methods. Deeply influenced by speculative fiction, storytelling, and the gothic, her oeuvre is characterized by a strong connection to the chthonic and the political. She combines and remixes organic and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between virtual and material networks as sites for liberation. Joranko was the 2023 recipient of the Goldsmiths/Acme Early Career Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally in exhibitions including i know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery, CCAD; #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio, New York; and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She has also recently shown with Studio Chapple (Feria Material 2025, Mexico City) and will have her first institutional solo show at BWA Wrocław, Poland, in July 2026.
Michael Lye (b. 2001, Narrm/Melbourne) is a Malaysian-Australian artist currently based in London, UK. Lye’s practice researches the social and metaphysical interpretations of “spatiality” within the framework of an existentialist or active-nihilistic reality. His sculptural spaces are founded upon the interplay of industrial lead, hard materiality, and their structures’ modular and entropic nature. This juxtaposing dialogue, alongside a constant navigation between control and hostile, violent forms, aims at pointing to the benign social and physical constraints that obstruct individual agency within architectural, metaphysical, and political spaces. Lye is currently completing his MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London. He is a recipient of the RCA Presidents and Vice-Chancellors International Scholarship for the 2025/26 study year.
Ian Margo (b. 2000, Spain) is a digital artist and researcher focused on the intersection between language, technology, and economy. Working with a wide range of media such as video, software, interface design, experimental essay, generative AI, 3D, blockchain, datamoshing, performance, and interactive installations, his practice examines language and its entanglement with material and political processes, with a particular focus on value production, tokenisation, and objectification, understanding language and markets as operative media within contexts of visual rupture and intrinsic hyperconnectivity. His practice has been presented through exhibitions, screenings, performances, and academic contexts across Europe, Asia, and the United States, including institutions, festivals, and platforms such as CEDAR (Shanghai), Grey Area Festival (San Francisco), ADAF (Athens Digital Arts Festival), Hangar (Barcelona), Matadero Madrid, and NYU Shanghai. He is a co-founder of 邊界_RG (Biānjiè Research Group), an artist-based group focused on machine learning, cognition, memory, and interface design. As a researcher, he has published in DIFFRACTIONS and the Institute of Network Cultures. He is currently part of the SYBIL ARC2 residency program in Berlin.
COMEDY OF MENACE is a London-based curatorial collective consisting of Orphée Kashala (b. 1997, Lubumbashi), Adrian Preisler (b. 2000, Copenhagen), and Aldo Zocca (b. 2000, Copenhagen). Their methodological starting point unsettles the line between the sincere and humorous, productively drawing on pedantry and paranoia as a shakily stimulating curatorial position akin to a contemporary jester’s privilege. Kashala and Preisler are both enrolled in the MA Curating Contemporary Art program at the Royal College of Art, while Zocca is undertaking an MA in Innovation at Central Saint Martins. They are also friends in the way only potential future enemies can be.