At St. Chads, London, the artist has installed a smelly, sticky clump of live yeast culture in the gallery. It’s the beginnings of a lesson about art, life and the creatures we create
A person’s sense of smell, dictated by olfactory receptors, is 10,000 times more sensitive than taste. I remembered that factoid when entering Mute Track. In the centre of the space hangs a SCOBY (a ‘Symbiotic Culture Of Bacterial Yeast’, apparently), like a disco ball of horrors. Bianca Hlywa has attached chunks of brown and vomit-green blubbery culture to a lattice of polypropylene strapping – the kind used for cargo tie-downs or marine equipment – and holstered it up from a scaffold in the centre of the rectangular space. Then it starts to spin. The motor – connected to a control box on the gallery wall, fitting in seamlessly beside an original power box for the building – will speed up, slow down, stop, in alternating patterns looped on a six-minute schedule, the heavy sheet pirouetting like a rotting ballroom dress. And yes, the stench is formidable: acidic, vinegary, thin enough to slip between pores and clothing fibres. It clung to my clothes for the rest of the day.
According to the notes, Hlywa fermented the culture in her studio for five months, then two more in the space. Each evening the artist takes the sheet down and lays it, spreadeagle, in a flat chemical bath in the corner of the gallery; each morning, its cultures nourished and rested, the 110kg Thing must be hoisted up again. (That St. Chads constitutes two units of a former ‘ear, nose and throat hospital’ storage unit near King’s Cross, makes you wonder if this is the worst this space has seen.) So Mute Track is a laborious exhibition for the artist but perhaps especially for the artwork, a living, dripping Thing, rolled out and made to dance for its dinner. Do we not see something of ourselves in this yeast-lined duvet, carted out each day to perform a life?
This grim muckiness is once again finding favour in the artworld. You’d have to have your eyes closed to have missed messes like Mire Lee’s Open Wound (2024) at London’s Tate Modern this winter; or your nose blocked to escape Dan Lie’s The Reek (2024), a paganlike construction of mud, straw and fungi that then inhabited and germinated in the gallery space at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. But there’s something particularly – grimly – absurd about Mute Track, a sense of humiliation inflicted on this Thing, strung up and swung around for our gawping, nostril-clasping entertainment, painting its dripping life-sauce in patterned circles onto the floor. Its muteness is of course part of this: the room is almost silent bar the mechanism’s high-pitch whirr – like a factory conveyor belt, or the original Thing’s thin, pained wail – and the quiet slaps and squelches of chemical brushed across the black sticky floor. Grotesque; mesmeric.
Of course, the grotesque has long been recognised as the underbelly of beauty, its dark unconscious. The lengths of absurdist care Hlywa takes, assuming for herself a simultaneous role of the work’s creator and tormentor, feel like the beginnings of a lesson: about what we do with the Things we loose on the world. Art – like its all-seeing parent, culture – has perennially been vulnerable to beautification, or sanitisation: a general smoothening and polishing whose motivators range from the regulation of commerce to, at its worst, a fascistic impulse. Mute Track sounds more like a rallying cry: roll up your sleeves.
Mute Track at St. Chads, London, through 12 April
