Test Portal

Spatial installation and video, 2025

A portal can be a physical or symbolic bridge over a liminal space, under which one may pass either unexpectedly on one’s way through the fractured landscape of possible futures, or with an adventurous intent, progressing dauntlessly to where semantic drift of the collective unconscious has decided to direct its flow, seemingly regardless of rhyme and reason.

Test Portal allows the visitor a few curated entrances into this reality, inevitable and absurdly impossible at the same time – a set of symbolic mirrors within mirrors, reflecting on the onlooker both the despair and the whimsicality of their lost futures. In them, hauntological hellscapes of the deep  past become playgrounds where the creatures of “a future” glide over plains of magma smoothly like bubbly, bloated shapes inside a lava lamp.

The postmodern condition has bestowed the function of the ancient archetype of the portal almost uniquely upon the ever-present phenomenon of the Screen as both the force that pulls one through space-time, as well as the space-time one is pulled through by this force. Test Portal seeks to encase this formula in a veneer of (ostensible) physicality. Screens and holograms presented here are not solely abstract phenomena – they are woven into a frame of tangible matter, which at the same time accrues on the outside of the screen or hologram and bleeds into the virtual reality they project. The texture thus becomes the textual – the Test Portal becomes a Text Portal.

The exhibition Test Portal comprises a set of installations, displaying videos that convey a feeling, a fashion and design of a different world - maybe a parallel dimension, maybe a mental projection, perhaps a mind game - that is characterized by the planet being covered in lava, with all the cultural and civilizational consequences that state of affairs might pose on the society that lives in it. The “portals” themselves are clothed and wrapped in textile shapes that complement the animated visuals and help to invoke the unique atmosphere of the world.

Text author: Aljaž Glaser @aljazglaser
Textile portal production: Amelija Kracina, Isak Podgoršek @amelijakracina @isak_podgorsek
Expert assistance and portal stand production: Matic Gselman @matic_gselman
Additional 3D design: Jaka Juhant @jjjuhant
Music: Peter Ferlan @peterferlan
Technical assistance: Valter Udovičić
Photography: Mario Zupanov @zupanov
Co-organizer: Društvo Ljudmila, Laboratory for Science and Art
Support: Ministrstvo za kulturo Republike Slovenije, Mestna občina Ljubljana