emilija.____
ArtEvol 2025 / Emilija Povilanskaite & Yuma Burgess
Ibbur , 2025 Cast aluminium, glass, helium, argon, electrodes 120 × 50 cm
Emilija Povilanskaite is a London-based Lithuanian visual artist and film director. Her practice merges storytelling with technology, science, research and olfactory design. Exploring how digital worlds transform perception, Povilanskaite draws on folklore and myth to create multisensory fictional spaces that connect imagination, technology and embodied human experience. London-based visual artist Yuma Burgess makes otherworldly objects that merge primaeval symbolism with modern-day technology. Laser-cut slabs made of spray paint, sand, and resin reference the fluid computers of the early 1900s, but resemble ancient Egyptian tablets circa 3150 BC. Inspired by ancient civilisations, cave paintings and rock art, Burgess uses mythology as a way of understanding our lived experience.
Artwork Introduction
Ibbur draws from Kabbalistic tradition, where ibbur ( עיבור , meaning ‘impregnation’) describes a form of benevolent possession in which an ancestor’s soul temporarily inhabits a living person to offer guidance and wisdom. This voluntary spiritual merging suggests that identity emerges not only from personal experience but through the spirits invited to inhabit the body. This ancient practice illuminates contemporary identity formation, where transformation is increasingly sought through external intelligences, both spiritual and artificial. As these forces are integrated into being, Ibbur questions whether individuals remain active agents in their own becoming or have transformed into vessels for futures that progressively shape and direct consciousness.
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