A project that began in 2021, Kabbalistic Futurism offers an open-ended exploration into the layers of reality beyond current scientific reach using the teachings of Treister’s Jewish upbringing, specifically her early fascination with the Kabbalah for its ability to open her mind in new directions. Long before the discovery of the Big Bang, Kabbalist texts contained the notion that all creation sprang forth from one point. In this way, Treister’s interest in the Kabbalah finds unexpected parallels to her current collaborations with cosmologists and astrophysicists at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Treister states, “I am interested in the idea that these areas of Kabbalah and scientific cosmology might be capable of informing each other in their search for the underlying nature of reality, just as I feel that experimenting with thinking like an artist could have a positive effect on scientists.”

Alongside the Kabbalistic Manuscripts, Treister presents paintings and works on paper which transform her Tree of Life interpretations into blueprints for a potential future technological utopia. Hallucinogenic and hypnotic, Treister’s designs for museums, space stations, residential buildings, cultural pavilions, gardens, and algorithms dissolve categorical and disciplinary boundaries, embodying ethical systems of infinite relationships on Earth and in outer space. In three monumental paintings, Treister takes the viewer out of their own perception of reality and transports them to world full of materiality, color, and shape. Glowing with an amber atmosphere, Kabbalistic Futurism-Space Station for Transforming Light, 2023, depicts a mountain range foregrounded by a city of multicolored peaks. Alluding to refracting light or settling dust, a celestial precipitation twinkles above this otherworldly landscape while a massive blue orb ­subsumes the center of the painting. The project’s central motif, a Tree of Life, appears above this orb, each node made up of colorful polygons, presiding over the foreign composition. Throughout Treister’s work, these unexpected combinations of light, form, and color become sites where the spiritual, cosmological, and political blend. With this exhibition, Treister encourages all of us to open our minds to the possibilities of transcendence and visions of a different future of humanity.