Inertality
Àngels Miralda
A body lies flat on the forensic table. Clean white walls and a cold metallic ground separate it from its unspecified extraction site. Based on the evidence, this must have been a place both abandoned and vibrant, like the trail of any mammal that moves through a forest. Thistles stick to fur and fine hairs get loose on brambles, suggesting the occurrence of life’s cyclical dance for survival. Can something lie on the forensic table that is still teeming with life? The body lies open for investigation, yet information still travels to and fro via its nervous system, and life swells between protective curved ribs, carried by blue and red oxygenated copper veins.
Known for their sculptural assemblages ripe with science-fiction imaginary based in a post-pollution present, Inside Job’s material and conceptual work proposes a reckoning with a changing planetary chemistry. Symbols inspired by ancient botanical manuscripts and art nouveauesque forms combine natural and industrial elements to create a new codex of interpretability for a post-exposure society. The newest works combine forms sourced from the decaying tankers off of Athens’ Elefsina industrial port and the surroundings of the artists’ studio in the outskirts of Poznań. Rusting tankers float on the calm Aegean with visible rust and weather damage, industrial gears and machines lay weather-beaten and covered with the overgrowth of organic lattices. These diverse geographies are connected through a network of industrial peripheries in which abandonment creates new forms of aesthetic cohesions.
The remains and cross-sections of these colossal remains form the anchor of this exhibition in a series of sculptural ribs titled Interstices (2026). They appear as curved spear-like metallic cuts that curve outwards from floor or wall-based positions. They are named after the central protective bone of torsos that are also used to construct the cargo-holds of ships in the form of rib-shaped wood or metallic beams that radiate out from a central spine. These forms exist to protect a hollow – the organs and the life they maintain, as well as precious cargo and in the construction of aircraft fuselage. At the same time, they serve as the blood cells of global industry, transporting goods around the globe in a constant cycle of delivery. Around them, black rubber cables drop into heaps swirling around the floor. Copper runs through them, an electronic circulatory system that transmits energy where needed.
Beyond this, a large-scale fabric work titled Membrane (2026) acts as a separator and protective biofilm between sections. On transparent textile sewn through with organza seams, gear-like and botanical references appear on an airy boundary that both separates and allows for visibility across space. These porous fragments are collaged, no longer resembling their initial bodies but digested and processed through digital software and developed into new symbols. The membranes create a spatial body without organs – Deleuze and Guattari’s non-hierarchical system of distribution that constitutes the ultimate state of deterritorialization. They hold and embalm air rather than the individual parts that make up this decentered body, claiming space itself as an additional element in this arrangement of laid-out interconnected network. Rather than creating a system of an inside and outside, they maintain an openness that rejects closed systems in favour of the planetary assemblage.
Following on the metabolized images that appear on taut fabric, rough strings snag onto cut metallic sculptural forms in the series Entwined (2026). They produce accidental spider-like webs that run through slender hanging sculptures constituted by interwoven sharpnesses of blade and dried blue thistle. The forensic analysis fails. Rather than identifying a cause of death, the viewer is inside of a living organism. It is not the body that has failed, but rather, an antiquated binary between life and death, the natural and the man-made, the pure and the contaminated. Each element of this installation contains a tension between the inertness of its elements and material immortality. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be processed, digested, and chemically altered by planetary systems that crush, recombine, and create new matter out of the old.
Inside Job creates a corporeal reckoning with our contemporary environmental inheritance. Light and heavy textiles contain images from silkscreen prints, echoing the industrial advances and complex machines that have built a global, deterritorialized economy. Cargo vessels are the red blood cells that keep this material flow moving through commercial channels and trade routes across the world.This history of human exploitation, environmental evolution, and the development of industrial technology is not a part of the past, but firmly anchored in the present as the rust-clad sides of giant tankers, and skeletal remains of shipwrecks that inhabit the peripheral shores of manufacturing hubs. Their existence traces a dislocated and global picture of contemporary industrial aftermath. Lying flat, dissected, yet breathing is a global network of distributed parts. A worldwide body without organs connects to the central needs of an economy hungry for accumulation. Organs decay and recombine into new forms for survival.
—Àngels Miralda
Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus are visual artists based in Poznań, Poland, working as the artist duo Inside Job. Their joint practice focuses on the processes of sedimentation and accumulation, life-bearing systems, and identity construction within the context of dynamic changes such as the climate crisis, technological acceleration, political shifts and growing anxiety about the impending unknown. Many of their projects refer to catastrophic scenarios in which the hauntings from the past and futuristic speculations are intertwined—incorporating fiction as methodology, they explore its self-fulfilling potential, forecasting dystopias and utopias to examine their limitations and possibilities.
Inside Job received the 2nd Hana Future Art Award (2026) and the Młoda Polska Scholarship (2026). They were shortlisted for the International Allegro Prize (2020); finalists in the International Artagon IV competition in Paris (2018); and recipients of the Poznań Artistic Scholarship (2023), the Poznań City Award for Emerging Artists (2020), the Prize of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2018), and the Santander Universidades Prize (2016). Selected solo exhibitions include: eastcontemporary, Milan, IT; FUTURA, Prague, CZ; Cantina, Aarhus, DK; Hot Wheels Projects, Athens, GR; Šopa Gallery, Kosice, SK; BSMNT, Leipzig, DE; 66P Gallery, Wrocław, PL; Pawilon, Poznań, PL; SKALA, Poznań, PL. They have been selected to participate as part of the Polish Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale, opening in September 2026.
Àngels Miralda works on the connection between landscape and identity, exploring how culture and human identity are shaped through negotiation with our material surroundings. According to Miralda, imperialism as a cultural model is defined by the imposition of forms and cultures out of sync with their exterior reality, supported by the politically servile institutions. Her practice also considers adaptation to change, migration, and climate shifts, and the resilience of mutation as an integral part of critical contemporary culture.
Miralda is internationally recognized for her theoretical and critical writing, including “Who Killed the Independent Curator?” published in Frieze Magazine. She served as editor-in-chief of Collecteurs Magazine for four years, where she called for institutional accountability in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Over the past decade, she has organized over 60 exhibitions across Europe and Latin America, including Contemporary Biennial TEA (2024) and two editions of Off-Biennial Cairo (2023 & 2025). Her writing has appeared in publications and artist monographs by Phaidon Press, Cukrarna, TBA21, IVAM, GRIMM Gallery, and others.
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