As our faith in a better future slowly fades in the face of an increasingly oppressive reality, so do the ways in which we cope with the situation, learn to function in it and still have some fun despite the discomfort and stress. As the external conditions of the world we inhabit become more radical, so does the imagination of our resistance.

One of the primary inspirations for the creation of the Shapeshift Spaceship project is the work and life story of the artist Ovartaci (1894-1985). Ovartaci were born in Ebeltoft, Denmark as Louis Marcussen and assigned male at birth. In 1923 they moved to Argen- tina for work. There they traveled, experimented with psychedelic drugs, and in doing so gained a new view of themselves. Upon their return to Denmark in 1929, Marcussen were diagnosed with schizophrenia and interned in a facility in Aarhus. In this environ- ment, Marcussen adopted the gender-neutral pseudonym Ovartaci and in 1957 under- went a gender reassignment. During their long stay in the asylum, Ovartaci gradually created in paintings, drawings, carved statues and puppets a parallel universe inhab- ited by androgynous lizard-like creatures. Just as the distinction between humans and animals is blurred in the anthropomorphized form of this world‘s inhabitants, so too is its temporal-local destination. It mixes the present with references to ancient civilizations and visions of the future, as well as cultural references including ancient Egypt, India and China, among others. The space confines of the background did not pose a limit for Ovartaci, and thus the figures and motifs of their author‘s universe expanded freely into the surrounding spaces of the institutional room. Ovartaci underwent their final life shapeshift in 1972, when they began to re-identify themselves as a man. Ovartaci died in 1985 in the Rosskov psychiatric hospital, having spent an uninterrupted, hard-to- believe fifty-six years between its walls.

Like Ovartaci in the last century, we can now think in terms of a universe whose conceptual and spa- tio-temporal limits are not constrained by the rigidity of categories but fluidly oscillate between them. The exhibition Shapeshift Spaceship is a collective science fiction speculation about a universe out- side established gender and taxonomic norms. In a transfuturistic universe, being at the border of states is not an anomaly, but a starting point. A universe whose unfixed setting of the self is inherently inter- or trans- allows us to take the ancient Egyptian third gender of the Sekhet and place its civiliza- tion, with its fantastic megalithic structures and pantheon of trans deities, on an assemblage of desert moons in a distant galaxy. Indian hijras or Mexican muxe could inhabit the solar system in a revolutionary interplanetary experiment. The richness of the possible space races and species under consideration is itself an inspiring source of thinking about difference and diversity, positively irritating science fiction readers since the genre‘s earliest days. Taking a cue from Afrofuturism, transfuturism is a speculative emancipatory genre creating a new and more inclusive version of mythology, with minority empower- ment becoming a key part of its role. In the transfuturist universe, diversity and uniqueness are seen as the basic initial quality from which everything else is derived.

Radical shapeshifters transcend the boundaries of the humanity by transforming their identities and bodies, which they bend, transform and shape into new constellations outside of established norms. They do so out of necessity as well as curiosity, as an act of personal integration, revolutionary resistance and for the joy of discovery. The exhibiting artists each express different thoughts and their own authentic life expe- rience through their works. Anthr0morph is a thoroughly transfuturistic being: they defy traditional unambiguous classification in terms of gender, performing their tran- shumanist identity of unclear species determination, being at once a living human and a virtual avatar. The exhibition combines traditional figurative sculpture with AI chatbot, hologram and performance. The Hellenic-futuristic work is inspired by the trans priest- hood that participated in religious rituals in ancient Greece.

Alex Sihelsk* is also presenting two different outcomes in the exhibition – drawing and video. The enigmatic anthropomorphic creatures on the wall drawings are created by tracing joints, stains and cracks. The video malicious is a techno-pagan psychedelic collage illustrating the mind of a queer person of the digital age, who gradually ceases to distinguish between their own ideas and prompts for artificial intelligence. This adds a mirror version to the widely debated question of whether the machine mind fed by human data is becoming more human: is learning mutually occurring, and is the human also becoming a machine at the same time?

The diabolical figure of El Pelele combines drag travesty, the cuteness of dolls and marionettes with the aesthetics of BDSM and cabaret. El Pelele is a complex avatar, an animated mask whose multiple meanings are sewed together with thick stitches just like the colorful fabrics of the costume that make up its identity. In the exhibition, it is presented with a series of drawings of various bodily mutations, two large-scale paintings and digital collages, bringing an element of glitch to its aesthetic.

Veronika Žilinská takes viewers on a spectacular retrofuturistic visual ride, whose abstract forms are a celebration of transition in the sense of both gender change and the video effect. The seri- ousness and dignity of the video is radically undermined by the soundtrack by Tomáš Moravanský, which, in addition to its humour, adds an aspect of inevitable carnality to the originally machine-like, abstract and dehumanised aesthetic.

Chin Tsao presents ceramics whose folds and shapes remind us that a certain frivolity is inherent in fauna as well as flora. Chin also presents two of the planned four-part vid- eo series The Land of Promise: Eutopa and Harmony 3.0. The films, which serve also as music videos of her parallel identity Pope Sangreta, bring the daydreaming from stellar heights back to the scorched earth of a planet in the flames of late petrocapitalism.

The Shapeshift Spaceship exhibition can perhaps leave us with another impression in addition to a sense of imagination free from normative thinking: as if we‘ve been there before. As much as it always looks to the future, every -futurism is also an archaeology (as in the antique futurism of Athr0morph). All -futurisms implicitly contain the lived themes of our present and, through it, our past, for the present is nothing but the result of millennia of human history and billions of years of evolution of organic life and the universe itself. Indeed, our imaginations and dreams, even the most daring visions, are always com- posed and stitched together (as El Pelele does with its costumes and the characters in its drawings) from fragments of what we already know, what is already part of us and what we are made of on various levels (as in the Alex Sihelsk* video). The Shapeshift Spaceship is thus also a museum of the future (as in Veronika Žilinská‘s retrofuturism). It seems that we must first leave our planet on an imaginary futuristic trip that will give us a sweet sense of independence from its all-too-physical and oppressive limits. Only then, with new ideas and ideals, can we return to it again and experience the Planet of the Apes effect: to realize that all the fascinating diversity, multiplicity and interconnectivity of all things is staring us in the face all the time. The story of our future is being written now. Our normative beliefs about what is natural and what is anomaly begin to crumble when we realize that the world, whether nature or culture, is full of limiting and hard-to-classify examples. But the twilight is never far away (as Chin Tsao reminds us with her videos). So we have to keep dreaming it and also keep fighting for it if we want to be free as we wish.

— Šimon Kadlčák