Julia Shanker visited Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s recent exhibition, Paintings Made for Aliens Above at P·P·O·W gallery in New York. Kafchin shared the deeper meaning behind her work, which centers on science fiction, Romanian traditions, and transgenderism. She also discussed “cosmic genitals,” her love of MiniDiscs, and what she imagines humanity’s first interaction with alien life to look like.
In Paintings Made for Aliens Above, Hortensia Mi Kafchin turns classical oil paintings into an introspective diary, where she contemplates what the future of humanity might look like once AI reigns supreme. Each work hovers between mechanical and mythical, embodying Renaissance motifs that are charged with transhuman anxieties. She invites a dialogue with more evolved versions of ourselves, one that is unexpectedly peaceful and humane.
“I address my art to aliens,” Kafchin says, “It’s not a critique but an irony… if they land here or if they exist, they are so much more powerful than us.”
Kafchin is fascinated by power and how it manifests in hierarchical structures, specifically within the arts world. As a Romanian-born Eastern European artist, she occupies a minority position within that system compared to artists with more resources in Western Europe. “We don’t have the luxury to die of an overdose,” she said. “We don’t have the luxury to be a star; we only have the work, the technique, and the vision. We don’t have a big empire to back us up.”
Kafchin is based in Berlin but was born in Galati, Romania, a port town on the river of Dunabe. Kafchin’s mother is a teacher, and father was an engineer and lifelong science obsessive, who passed away while Kafchin was working on this exhibition. His presence runs through the sci-fi language of her work.“When you lose someone, you see them in the things they loved,” she told me. MiniDiscs, toolboxes, computer screens—these all remind her of her father. “Even the smell of electronics reminds me of him,” she said.
Kafchin made the entire exhibition in just two years. Most of the paintings were completed in her Berlin studio, but Duty to fix oneself was made in Romania. It was her first work after her father’s death, and though he never saw it, the one in which she feel she is most present.
In Flowers from Earth / First Contact, Kafchin imagines humanity’s first encounter with alien life. She envisions a future in which humans “lose their human status” and evolve into robots; only then, she says, will we earn the “privilege” of meeting extraterrestrials. The encounter she imagines is refreshingly peaceful: an oversized cyborg offering a bouquet of flowers to a bashful alien visitor.
Beyond the message, Kafchin challenged herself to create “the perfect robot” aesthetically, a trial she’s become used to but continues to refine: “It’s like a mannerism for me,” she said. “Even with my eyes closed, I can make a robot.”
Kafchin works in a saturated, candy-bright palette that adds a sense of surrealness to each of her pieces. In All Planets Above, the temperature drops into cool-tones pushed to such extremes that certain elements appear fluorescent. To achieve this chromatic tension, Kafchin first painted the river in All Planets Above red. This high-contrast underpainting is native to Kafchin’s technique and gives her works a glow-in-the-dark quality, one that, to play into her themes, you can imagine to be visible from outer space.
In Full A.I. Revolution / After FFS places us inside a dressing room, where two women sift through a rack of neon garments. The foreground feels familiar, but behind the women looms a large mechanical face. The painting speaks to Kafchin’s transgenderism and the “small victories” of self-evolution, set against the faster, more relentless evolution of technology and AI.
Cosmic scale dysphoria takes on a monochromatic palette in shades of purple, a color Kafchin feels is representative of transgenderism. “It is also one of my favorite colors,” she said.
Here too, Kafchin folds the real into the surreal, depicting a contorted human form with realistic limbs but abstract, geometric genitals. “The genitals are so cosmic,” she said.
The piece asks: What are the genitals? And challenges the viewer to see them as both vital machinery and mere abstraction.
While the eyes are instantly drawn to the central figure, Kafchin spent the most time creating the cloudy, violet atmosphere. She first applied a diluted purple, and then “chipped away at it with a napkin,” a process called negative painting that gives the background its texture. This technique also makes the piece impossible to replicate.
Despite her cosmic thinking and love of sci-fi, Kafchin imagines something far more traditional for herself. In the Dobrogean National Costume, an orange cyborg wears a peasant dress, surrounded by farm animals, as if a futuristic body had been dropped into her grandmother’s garden in rural Romania.
Kafchin hopes her own life might look something like this: forward into possibility, then back to the soil she came from. “I’ll grow old if I am lucky,” she said, “And if I grow old, I would like to interface with my grandmother.” The future she envisions is not just technological but also domestic and tender. “I want things to take care of,” she said.