On November 23rd, 2023, Harabel inaugurated “OVERLORDS: On the transformation of the human body”, an exhibition of Krist Dragot, at the GurGur Gallery in Petrelë.

The transition from Modern to Postmodern in its interruption of the linearity of modern thought, always tending towards the new, has in fact built the premises for an exploded narrative, according to the rhizome model intended by Deleuze and Guattari. If on the one hand this has allowed the creation of multiple points of view and multiple keys to access information and more generally to participate in the construction of the perception of personal and collective reality; on the other hand, it created a sense of loss of orientation; a loss of the sense of progress as an indefinite improvement in general living conditions, a general disorientation which has slowly led to a situation of widespread general uncertainty. This has worn away the boundaries of our certainties, also calling into question the boundaries of our own body, the place through which we directly experience the world, that defines our identity, our very being “human”. In fact, we have always identified our fears through what is deformed, with the “monster”; which by definition is precisely that mythological figure whose body is made up of heterogeneous parts that seem to come from different genres and species. The monster is the visualization of what we cannot rationally confine within any category, other than that of something that goes beyond (post) nature. The shape we give to the world derives in fact from the shape of our relationship with it, questioning the boundaries of our body also means questioning our experience of the world. Through postmodern thought, in the attempt to overcome the classic mind-body, human-animal, human-machine dualism, man has lost sight of the boundaries that outline his own form, remaining disoriented.

In the body of works that Krist Dragot presents for the first time in the spaces of Gurgur gallery, the young artist confronts precisely this sense of disorientation, which translates pictorially into a post-human body. A body that seems to carry on itself the weight and suffering of its own transformation, of its passage towards a new entity, whose final form is not the consequence of a natural evolution, but rather of decisions taken by ultra entities (overlords) who manipulate the threads of our perception from behind the scenes of reality. Entities that guide and transform taste, sense and approach to reality and consequently transform our body, continuously deforming it in a heterogeneous way. Black is not only a sign used to delineate the boundaries of the characters painted by the artist, but it also becomes a way to question these boundaries and to increase the sense of disorientation facing these figures who seem to move millennia back in linear history of human evolution, and at the same time, millennia ahead to an unknown future, more dystopian than utopian.

This leads us to the question of how do we imagine our own being human in this condition of perpetual disorientation and transformation? How can we contain the vertigo of the unknown if we can no longer even count on our own bodies? What if instead the way out of this vertigo was precisely the loss of our original shape? What if the final solution was not to have a form and to embrace transformation as a natural conclusion of the very process of being human? Like a cycle that begins and ends in the body.

Curatorial text by Stefano Romano