Deborah Schamoni

The first major collaborative work by Maryam Hoseini and WangShui, The Demon and the Muse (DM) (2025) is a translucent mural made directly on the glass facade of SITE SANTA FE’s entryway. Rendered in oil paint, ink, and pastel on vinyl, the work refracts the sun’s rays both into the foyer and outward. Over the course of each day, light animates and transforms Hoseini’s contorted figures and WangShui’s tessellated, serpentine forms. Motifs from each artist’s visual lexicon remain visible in this joint commission: Hoseini’s flattened, fragmented, and abstracted figures; WangShui’s sculptural approach to light. DM also reflects the pair’s entwined conceptual concerns—hybridity, liminality, and the circuitous structures that govern and connect us. The project for the 12th International is inspired by their long friendship and endless conversations about life and painting under the influence of technology. 

In 1865, chemist August Kekulé dreamed of an ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake devouring its own tail. As the story goes, the serpent’s infinite form sparked a realization: that the benzene ring—a molecular compound that became crucial to the production of plastics and gasoline—is circular in structure. “The Kekulé Problem” is an essay written by Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) while he was a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center based in New Mexico. This 2017 text uses the titular scientist’s reverie as a frame to discuss language’s relationship to the unconscious, which, McCarthy argues, speaks in images, not tongues. The formless communications that surface from its depths are translated into meaningful narratives—archetypes such as serpents—which are in turn rearticulated in language. 

WangShui and Hoseini’s DM reenvisions the ouroboros as both myth and mechanism: a loop in which technology, corporeality, and desire perpetually feed back into one another. Here this ancient alchemical symbol is likened to a contemporary condition—a recursive structure that mirrors our entanglement with the digital rhythms and data cycles of mediated intimacy. Yet despite its references to enclosed, spiraling forms, the work retains an unexpected porosity. Mediated by (and, in turn, transmuting) the building’s original glass, DM filters light to reconstitute the entry/exit as an unbounded, luminous threshold. As fiery-hued colors dance throughout and beyond the institutional space, light bleeds between the psychic architectures we inhabit and those that inhabit us.

Text: Sophia Larigakis