Bioism turns pink at Milan Design Week this year. Tempesta Gallery is presenting Mutative Transitions into Organic Utopia, a site-specific project by the Ukrainian artist Aljosha.

Mutative Transitions into Organic Utopia invites complete wonder and contemplation.

The installation is a multiverse of painted translucent acrylic glass. These extend from the ceiling of Tempesta Gallery in an ethereal web of intertwining. Standing beneath it may feel a bit like cloud gazing.

I see ballerinas mid-leap. I also see clusters of intergalactic stars, back-bending acrobats, and literal bats (the flying mammals) with their fully extended wingspan. There’s also pink ice spreading across a car windshield in winter. In one cluster, I see angelic beings communing in the church’s higher atmosphere, some of them floating down as if they are about to listen to a prayer.

How do you make sense of the pink-hued shapes above you?

Imagination is one such way of creating new art, and this seems to be exactly in line with Aljosha’s artistic desire (“The artistic act will acquire the practical sense of life-forming.”), which is deeply rooted in themes of bioism and biofuturism.

Mutative Transitions is on display with that same biofuturistic lens, a life-affirming way of looking towards the future where we could all grow in richness with nature, rather than at its cost. Through this work Aljosha “invites the audience to imagine a future where every cell of future beings could be composed on the basis of hope, kindness, and a lasting quest for understanding and acceptance.”

It’s heady stuff.

“Aljoscha’s work lays the foundation for a dialogue between eudaimonia (a doctrine that considers happiness natural for humans and assigns to humans life the task of achieving it) and composition, delving into the complexities of mutations, suffering, and bliss: it is a visual and imaginative effort, an attempt to build a world where diversities are not condemned but celebrated.”

The suspended “sculpturesques” are made using a medium of organic and synthetic matter, including fiberglass and bioplastic. Aljosha draws inspiration “from life itself as an experiential process and the potential of our biology.”

Aljosha has also been deeply inspired by the ideas of David Pearce, a proponent of transhumanism, a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates for improving human conditions by developing and widely deploying sophisticated technologies that can significantly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being.

In the eclectic space of Tempesta Gallery, the distinctions between natural and unnatural blur. You may go in to visit as one person and come out changed.

Mutative Transitions into Organic Utopia opened to the public on April 11. It will run through June 28, 2024. Tempesta Gallery is located at Foro Buonaparte 68 in Milan. Their business hours are Tuesday to Friday 3 PM to 7 PM.