At Management in New York, Anastasia Komar unveils LUCA, an installation that invokes the primal murmurs of life’s earliest breath—an aesthetic speculation on the origins and futures of being.
Named after the Last Universal Common Ancestor, Komar’s work transcends biological nostalgia to become a sensorial matrix of sight, sound, and scent, composed in close collaboration with sound artist Kamron Saniee. The space is not so much entered as absorbed—one is drawn into a prebiotic interiority where organic and inorganic matter coalesce in lyrical ambiguity.
The accompanying text by Maya Kotomori, equal parts prose poem and biological incantation, unfurls like a sacred script of emergence. It is through this verbal ecology that LUCA speaks—“I am not first, but only”—a voice that echoes across evolutionary gulfs, embedding itself in marrow, membranes, and memory. Komar’s visual language is no less poetic: glimmering filaments suggest proto-cellular forms, their choreography recalling not a fossilized past but a dream of what might have shimmered before anything was remembered.
What distinguishes Komar’s practice is her refusal to reconstruct the past. Instead, she hypothesizes it, offers it up as a tactile hallucination. One encounters not history but hypothesis: a translucent chamber writhes, divides, broadcasts a synthetic genesis. Komar’s LUCA is not a specimen, but a medium—alive, yearning, radiating possibility. The installation feels like standing inside a threshold, not between life and death, but between pre-life and a still-forming post-organic intelligence.
