Mire Lee: The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead: Secession, Austria

Mire Lee’s large-scale immersive installations are often composed of leaking machines and quasi-organic structures that appear to drip and decay. Broken motorised elements seem to strain under their own operation, resisting the seamless efficiency associated with contemporary technology. In place of polished surfaces and frictionless performance, Mire Lee stages a world of resistance, drag, and deterioration. Her uncanny factory-like scenarios render matter unstable and visceral, evoking bodily fluids, flesh, and industrial waste while acting directly on the viewers’ senses and bodies.

At the Secession, the air feels thick – stuffy, hot, almost strained. The exhibition room’s otherwise crisp terrazzo floor bears traces of a viscous substance that spreads and flows down a slanted wall. Over the course of the exhibition, crusts will accumulate, forming a growing skin of rusty scabs. This obstructing partition serves as a barrier that conceals a large cement mixer sluggishly rotating in the back. The machine emits a dull, continuous sound, like a monotonous pulse – its belly is cut open like a wound, its inner core exposed, unable to come to rest.

This kinetic apparatus exists between vitality and breakdown. At its heart unfolds an entropic cycle: mechanically recalibrated and altered, the drum will keep rotating throughout the duration of the exhibition. A swarm of PVC tubes runs through the space like a vascular system, pumping liquid solution containing iron oxide, brass powder and sawdust among other things, in endless loops. The spiral blade of the cement mixer pulls the viscous red substance into motion, its surface catching occasional metallic flecks. The ceiling of the exhibition space has been stripped and its glass plates removed allowing the natural light to enter.

At the back of the room, old advertisement banners from past Secession exhibitions are spread across the last section of the exhibition. Their surfaces are marked with fragments of words dressed in brass leaf, alongside marks and patterns overlaid with lead-bearing solder. Referencing Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze cycle, the works bring an ornamental language into contact with industrial heat, toxicity, and residue. Lead, present in the solder, is now associated with contamination and harm, though it once circulated widely through architecture, craft, cosmetics, and ornament, valued as much for its malleability and sheen as for its utility. Its shimmer here feels less like splendour than a melancholy remnant: a material glow that has become difficult to desire.

The etymology and cultural history of “melancholy” turn this material darkness inward, toward the body itself. The word comes from the ancient Greek "melas", meaning black, and "choli", meaning bile, and speaks on the origin of bodily governance. Black bile was believed to originate in the spleen, and in excess to produce deep sadness and sorrow. An imbalance among the four body fluids – blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile – meant that a human body was failing, in decay: both in flesh and spirit.

Mire Lee’s works behave like dysfunctional hybrid beings, caught in relentless cycles of production and depletion. Here, the artist’s machinery takes another turn around its axis: occupying the centre of the room, it responds to the architecture of the building while also splicing the space apart. An environment of excess, dirt, and convulsion will grow and spread.