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What remains when the powers that keep us in check cease to exist? Ursula Mayer stages a world where definitions, categories, sex, and conventions are stripped of their meaning, giving us carte blanche to reexperience the raw sensation of being human, freed, even briefly, from all societal and systemic boundaries.

‘But We Loved Her’ read the floor-set neon that gave the artist’s 2013 show at Belvedere 21 its title – a fragment lifted from a banner seen in the crowds at the funeral procession for the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Alongside humming analogue projectors, fabric screens, and photographs referencing the body-machines of the late sculptor Bruno Gironcoli, custom-built metal display structures elevated objects into pseudo-archaeological artifacts. Disembodied garments and fluid glass sculptures appeared as seductive fragments, staged, like the banner text, as the residues of neoliberal indoctrination.

In other projects, the artist has worked with AI poems written in Sanskrit, holographic digital hearts, and complex, industrial, pump-driven water installations, intertwining machines and living organisms. Witnessing Mayer’s prophetic visions of a posthuman cosmology feels like entering a sci-fi film in the making. Her installations grant us a view behind the scenes, exposing the sets, costumes, and props that place us, the audience, on the other side of the fantasy and underlining our collective entanglement in a system that manages to seduce and exploit us at the same time. How do we live with the ambiguity of writing protest letters on our iPhones, or with the pressure to be productive while making work that critiques over-productivity? Mayer’s practice turns precisely these contradictions into material.

Whether by working with highly aestheticized transgender performers, who wander the abstract landscapes of Medea (2013) and Atom Spirit (2017), or by deconstructing language to playfully counter Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy –Gonda (2012) – Mayer creates a reality where categorization is arbitrary. Instead, she summons a primordial, hyper-fluid state of pure potential that precedes the act of becoming. It is a body of work that appears highly political yet consistently resists the stabilizing language of activism. Instead, it moves toward a spiritual, almost esoteric, dismantling of the world as we know it, asking what might emerge once the old structures finally fall.