For their exhibition in Aether, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld and Adrien Missika connect to the spirits of a long extinct species by an embodiment seance. Their aim is to have a clearer vision of the future by gathering lost knowledge from the past. They merge scientific and spiritual approaches like paleontology and seance for their purpose, using the spectator’s body as a catalyst.

For connecting to the deep past, they employ Coprolite: ca. 200 million years old, fossilized dinosaur excrement from the lower jurassic period. Guests are invited to ingest the fossilized excrements of ancient entities, to digest and decode the information stored in this fossile with their own bodies. The participants are then asked to examine the output for writing down their oracular interpretation of the demineralized organic dino-human hybrid matter.
By reaching far beyond the beginning of humanity with Coprolite and involving the public, the duo reflects on interspecies communication, time consciousness and life-death cycles.

Partition Animale is the first collaboration of Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld and Adrien Missika. It brings together Missika’s interest in time-travel and reenchantment using simple technologies with natural materials such as stones or plants, and Schönfeld’s engagement with oracular practices and alchemical experiments.

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The work of Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld jestingly deals with the spiritual and scientific imagination. It reflects on different kinds of knowledge, control- and truth-production,constituting and reproducing our human „self“ in the world. Her method is an appropriation and recomposing of concepts. In order to create new meanings and perspectives, common structures are sliced up, analysed and put back together in a different way, using oracular
techniocs and alchemical experiments. Approaches from various fields find themselves included in her practice, like natural science, religion, archeology, mythology, magic and technology. The work includes a wide range of mediums like photography, print, sculpture,
installation and performance.
Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld (*1979) graduated from UDK (Universität der Künste Berlin) in 2006.
She has had solo exhibitions at Zabriskie Point Geneva, Galleria Marso Mexico City, Galleria Mario Iannelli Rome, Goethe Institut St. Petersburg and Kunstverein Augsburg. Her work has also been exibited in many group exhibitions including Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Fotomuseum Winterthur Switzerland and Muzeum Ludwig, Budapest. She recieved a DAAD travel grant in 2005, has been a resident at Villa Aurora Los Angeles in 2011, won the Kunstfonds Stipendium Germany in 2012 and the FOAM Talents Award of th Fotomuseum Amsterdam in 2014. She lives and works in Berlin.

http://www.sarahschoenfeld.de

Adrien Missika is an artist who wone could call a contemporary neo-romantic for his ability to force the observer to take on a viewpoint that contains elements belonging to times and geographies near and far at once. Missika's art comes out of a practice combining technological deftness and manual skill, often having the appeal of the past mixed with the contemporary era. The results may be vital or decadent, reassuring or disquieting, and they always have an element of melancholy. He uses low-resolution videos, pictures taken with very long exposure times, ever changing print processing methods, sculptures made with reused objects and new materials, images of desolate, and magnetic places paired with soundtracks from artificial ambient noise, specifically designed for each occasion. He never fails to create an effect of fascinating, hypnotic alienation in the observer. Though Missika's works appear immediately interpretable,they are actually built on layers of multiple historical, anthropological, alchemical, scientific references, plus, and not least, cultural and experiential ones. Driven by his personal vocation for the exotic, he does his research on site, giving
him opportunities to assimilate, demolish and reconstruct a new, including through the time factor, the clichés through which each of us unconsciously builds a certain image, often a stereotyped one, of things far from us.
Adrien Missika (Paris, 1981) lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of the art space 1m3 in Lausanne in 2006, he graduated from ECAL (Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne) in 2007. He has had numerous personal exhibitions including 21er Haus in Vienna, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Centre d'art contemporain Genève, Switzerland and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His work has also been shown in many group exhibitions, among which at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metro Pictures, New York; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau;Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Montecarlo; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou Metz. In 2009 he was awarded the Swiss Art Award, in 2011 the Prize of the Fondation Ricard and the
Kiefer Hablitzel Prize. Adrien Missika is represented by the galleries Bugada & Cargnel in Paris and Proyectos Moncolva, Mexico City.

http://www.adrienmissika.com