Bunny Rave draws upon Nemanja Askov’s ongoing interest in repetition and variation. Five articulated life-size action figures are cloned from the same 3D source files. Previously used as individual figures, they are now brought together as a mini-society, each posed to play a different role.
Aug. 2025
The work formally sits at the meeting point of digital fabrication and performative staging. This tension reflects the logic of capitalist production and social choreography, in which bodies are subject to external design and social violence.
The choice of rabbits as anthropomorphic avatars operates on several levels. Culturally they embody contradictory associations: folklore trickster and pop sexuality versus pastoral symbols of innocence and fertility. Conceptually they stand in for posthuman performers as sexless hybrid beings. Materially, their hybrid bodies bring traces of biology into contact with the synthetic, combining animal remnants like fur pelts and cured rabbit ears with engineered plastic and metal.
The composition references both rave culture and historical sculpture. The arrangement recalls the interlocked forms of baroque groupings, while the legless torsos evoke archaic Greek kouroi and fragmented classical statues. The combination of fur and painted masks also invokes shamanistic rituals. The “dance” is ambiguous: it may be ecstatic self-abandonment or a state of forced exhaustion similar to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The masks will be painted in oil to carry a pictorial register into the sculpture and to individualise each figure. The steel frame, with its crisscrossing diagonals, functions as both a structural device and a volumetric field. It’s a physical version of the interface gizmos from the software where the figures were designed. Static lasers mounted on the frame will trace linear patterns onto the figures that emphasise the diagonal geometry of the frame’s volume.
Born of a pandemic origin story, the work carries a post-social-distance urge to pack bodies together. When cloned bodies share one constrained volume, their gestures collapse into a clustered system. The cage-like frame both binds and animates the figures, pressing them into a mass of limbs, diagonals, and intersecting gazes. Between nightclub, temple, and shopfront, Bunny Rave situates its figures at the threshold of ritual and commodity display.
The Working Process at SVFK
The plan was to 3D print the figures in my studio and then take the finished parts to the metal workshop at SVFK to focus on building the metal “bounding box”.
But I was unexpectedly invited to start in early July, much earlier than planned. I arrived empty-handed, with only my computer and my 3D printers, and decided to produce the prints on site. I would model, print, test, and assemble as I went, and later move on to building the frame.
The workshop’s 3D printer ran smoothly until it broke. Printing continued on my own budget printers, but the design began to shift. I cut the figures at the hips, focusing on the upper bodies to form a more compact volume of intertwined forms. Heads shrank, and faces became smaller shell-like masks attached with a hinge at the ‘brain’ area.
I replaced artificial fur with real rabbit pelts, sharpening my focus on the natural/artificial intersection. While sourcing pelts, I came across dried rabbit ears sold as dog treats. This discovery solved a technical problem (plastic ears were too heavy) and also opened a new conceptual layer. But the ears arrived as desiccated meat, smelly and unstable for exhibition, so I began a side project: tanning them.
Working in Formeriet, a studio with running water, I soaked the ears in brine for days, removed meat, fat, and cartilage, and tanned them in alum. The process yielded a batch of taxidermic ears ready to attach to the masks.
After three and a half weeks, I left with all the major components ready: about 250 printed body parts, life-size and post-processed, along with cured ears, tailored fur pelts, screws and bolts, and the complex frame elements. The final assembly, painting, and patination will take place in the gallery, in direct response to its layout.
