Nacoca Ko, an artist and curator based in Geneva, Switzerland, works with raw material sculpture, digital media, performance, and virtual worlds, as well as nonhuman and artificial intelligence.
Reflecting on the impact of recent technology on our personal psyche, collective consciousness, and the environment, she resists acceleration and zombification. Sculpting with polymers and concrete, she explores ‘noble’ materials left behind long after the Anthropocene. At the cliff of Singularity, where the future can no longer be predicted, Ko reverts to ancient ritual while positioning humans as a rudimentary link between nature and technology.  

Nacoca Ko recently exhibited at Photo Basel with Espace L (Basel, 2024). Other exhibitions include OXO Tower (London, 2024), Museu Eva Klabin/ Tal Art, (Rio de Janeiro, 2023), Dock-Basel (Basel, 2023), Espace Arlaud, (Lausanne, 2023), En Suite/Lovay Fine Arts (Lausanne, 2023); Harddisk Museum/ UltraSuperNew Gallery (Tokyo, 2023); New Currents Festival (Santa Fe, 2023); Espace L (Geneva, 2022,23,24), CADAF (Paris, 2022), Mock Jungle (Bologna, 2022); newart.city (2022), Offsite Project (London, 2021), sabl.live (2021), Andata/Ritorno (Geneva, 2021). Her work is in important private collections, and has also been shown at various international exhibitions in the metaverse

Focusing on forms that transcend their original media, she works from the digital to the material and back again. By digging into concrete, styrofoam, and washed-up plastics, she reveals the sedimentary layer of waste humans leave as evidence of their existence on the planet, fossils for the imagination of history. The tangible effect of our material impact works as an entry point for transformation in the worlds she imagines, animating the anxiety of acceleration, distorting landscapes, and crossing boundaries between the codes of what is real.

Looping from futurism,  she looks backward toward tribal anthropology. What did those wise sages know, looking out at the unmapped stars? What meaning and understanding did they have, that we may have lost, relinquishing our slow rites of passage and a sense of oneness? Sourcing from the universality of humankind throughout time, she brings with her some of the mystery, magic, and mutiny.

  ---

Maybe there are some random mutations, but we all knew for a long while, that the oral histories we pass down are an intuitive mimicry of the way our DNA passes stories to the next generation. Reproduction is an Epigenetic Incantation. Heat-seeking missiles penetrate humans one by one. Viral memes infect them with parasitic mind control, nano infusions recode their DNA. We risk disappearing from the inside out. 

 

Our global culture is woven from will and imagination - the ideas from our minds that create a chair, a social media community,

a food redistribution program, a spaceship, a mine for raw materials… our cognition spreads out to affect every aspect of existence on this planet.

 

We are pushed through progress, squeezed, immersed in new realms. Everything around us moves exponentially- we fall into vertigo, robbed of prediction, stability and a sense of concrete matter. And yet we keep climbing the wall, staying with the singularity. Our consciousness and will are sucked into a kind of liminal haze. But the liminal is just the place where energy and ideas are transmitted to materiality, a phygital space where dreams are transcribed into language.

Nacoca Ko