saints of the impossible
saints of the impossible
to be a saint of the Impossible is to seek a mysticism that does not transcend the world, but entangles with it — devotional, haunted, and immanent. the exhibitions collected here emerge from that same paradox: artifacts of a spirituality that has no object but still moves toward light. across dithered interfaces and scorched altars, these works speak in the poetry of relics -- objects made sacred not by decree, but by proximity to collapse and transcendence. they borrow from traditions of arte povera and sigil, from the melancholy of anime girlhood and the eschatological mood of planetary computation.
these are rituals for the end of ends. here, beauty does not promise salvation but offers, as Simone Weil writes, 'only itself'. chapels hold books of forgotten words; graveyards house printed sprites. the sacred returns as a residue: the angelic embedded in data and object, the impossible flickering inside humble gestures. what remains is not certainty, but a pensive attention -- as if by gazing with enough love, we might momentarily see the world without ourselves in it -- not to escape, but to bless it.
if the spiritual is not a departure from the world but a mode of being-with it, then technology is not its opposite, it is its medium. the works gathered here treat tools not as instruments of control but as consecrated objects. the interface is a veil and a membrane, the upload is a kind of prayer; to engage in ritual is not to enact belief, but to strive in the face of futility. these gestures do not promise resolution. instead, they amplify attention. they bring the impossible close enough to touch, if only for a moment.
the blueprint of the self is not fully knowable. yet through intuitive acts -- through a choreography of poetic inputs and symbolic exchanges -- a person traces its outline. the entanglement with the self becomes not an identity but a method: a devotion enacted through ritual labor, aesthetic compression, and encoded care. these artworks, scattered like offerings across digital and physical sites, refuse linear progress; they dwell in broken timelines, glitched egregores, and acts of surrender. in doing so they affirm a quiet theology of the networked spirit: that even amidst collapse, we may still be vessels -- of light, of memory, of impossible love.
to dwell with the impossible is to inhabit the interval -- to live in metaxis, in the threshold between finite and infinite, presence and absence. for Weil, beauty is the only thing that draws us toward the good without coercion; it wounds us and leaves us longing. in these exhibitions, that longing takes shape through detritus and shimmer: fragile installations, digital ghosts, abandoned sanctuaries. each piece becomes not a solution but a suspension, a site of yearning that neither reconciles nor resolves. the metaphysics of distance also contains its inverse: a becoming-ruin through ecstatic loss. and so, there is also rupture, expenditure without return, a holy futility that marks the moment as sacred precisely because it is unrepeatable.
each work here may also be understood as a kind of phylactery — a vessel that preserves the sacred not by sealing it away, but by carrying it through danger. in the tradition of reliquaries, these forms do not simply contain meaning; they protect it from the corrosive demands of legibility. attention, in the contemporary world, so often renders the ineffable inert -- flattened into data, rendered into its double. but the phylactery resists this logic -- it allows the esoteric to be glimpsed without being grasped. in this way, the avatar, the archive, the sculptural trace -- all become protective forms. they permit the self to be fragmented and performed, while something essential remains untouched beneath the surface. Weil writes 'may I disappear, so that the world may become perfect in its beauty' -- this is the gesture of the phylactery. not concealment out of fear, but devotion through displacement. a ritual architecture for enduring exposure, a spiritual interface that allows one to burn, like love, without being burned away.
what this work promised is not redemption, but attention; not salvation, but surrender. to make art in this key is to burn beautifully, to love without object, to vanish inside the light.
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the Saints of the Impossible is: ritual Transmission Agency, Youri Johnson, Iona Mackenzie, Eliška Jahelková, Anastasia Calinovici, Harris Rosenblum, Mariyasha,
tsvelyy_soup, clair st. claire, sybil, mad, anastasiya, scr4per, atonal.u, hunter, laure, alecchina, lapos sorride. developed by halo, sibyl and RTA.
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