Down The Rabbit Hole
A project that isn’t answerable to anyone
Stage Rabbit Pavilion — Wrong Biennale 2025
The Stage Rabbit Pavilion joins the 7th edition of The Wrong Biennale by expanding the frame of inquiry beyond AI to consider how intelligence, language, and presence are mediated, trained, and transmitted under the current acceleration of digital and networked conditions. Stage Rabbit’s engagement with gestures and encounters—embodied, hybrid, and diasporic—serves as an entry point to examine how such practices are reframed, displaced, or intensified in digital contexts and under machinic logics that increasingly shape cultural production. While the Biennale foregrounds the artistic side of artificial intelligence, our pavilion treats AI less as a tool and more as a context—one that collides with performance traditions, corporeal knowledge, and posthumanist critiques of what intelligence can mean – and looks at how it affects practices rather than form alone. The pavilion resists narrow dualisms of human versus machine, instead opening a living site where artists reimagine intelligence, training, and collaboration beyond anthropocentric frames. While the focus of the programme remains on the processes and works of the artists of Stage Rabbit, we also bring to stage the practices, archives, and events of artists associated with the studio in varying capacities.
Project Background
After experiencing the works of Guy Ben-Ary, such a CellF and Music for a Surrogate Performer, Kumar began examining how analog networks continue to challenge the discourse that artificial intelligence, neural networks, and networked systems reconfigure performance, visual art, and language, intersecting with ontologies rooted in presence and embodiment. Rather than reinforcing phobias or affirmative hope in the digital, the curatorial, initially titled ‘Echoes of Language not Yet Spoken’, delves into more the anxieties, frustrations, and despair that push the helplessness of the radical ideologues. The Pavilion challenges Enlightenment-centered ideas of intelligence by embracing biotechnological and ecological intelligences as new cultural heritages, at the same time turns to the considerations of humanistic posthumanism by Giorgio Agamben, which foregrounds ambivalence and ambiguity - in ideas, opinions, and actions. Through collaborative, evolving experiments in performance, visual art, and discourse, it interrogates intelligence as a political category and cultural legacy. The Pavilion is an open, living site for imagining hybrid, post-anthropocentric intelligences and new curatorial practices.