Catinca Malaimare
Gamma and Omega hold hands, 2023

Gamma and Omega hold hands, a solo exhibition by Romanian-born London-based artist Catinca Malaimare at the Zabludowicz Collection. In it, Malaimare’s choreography takes the form of performance, sculpture, audio and film, revealing our intimate relationship with technological tools.

Bathed in a cool blue light, the central motif of the installation – an industrial roller conveyor belt on movable wheels – rests patiently in a curved shape. A multi-channel audio narrative plays from a set of speakers hidden behind disco balls as the lead characters, Gamma and Omega, slowly enter the exhibition space. Wearing repurposed vintage leather motorcycle racing costumes, religious stoles, and dyed mesh tops, the performers undertake an imagined ritual, their intuitive movements promoted through a series of cues and gestures.

For thirty minutes, Gamma and Omega intertwine and labour alongside the cumbersome conveyor belt. The machine acts as another body, each taking turns at being passive and active, connected and disconnected. Machines and devices depend on bodies to function, and in real time we watch Gamma and Omega portray the tenderness and toil of this dynamic. Using poetic, spiritual gestures, Malaimare facilitates an ephemeral, fleeting moment which acknowledges our technological co-dependence.

Outside the performance times, the installation continues to hold a history of bodies and movement. The artist’s soundtrack continues, and a video record of the performance plays from a wall-mounted monitor in the exhibition space. Malaimare contextualises her characters and their intervention with the conveyor belt and space in a multidimensional, continuous loop, even without their physical presence. Together the components of the installation and the performance play with time and metaphor, building on the artist’s ongoing observation of obsolete technologies.