Hortensia Mi Kafchin: Through Different Eyes

Hortensia Mi Kafchin activates the Facade with a new installation, Through Different Eyes (2026). An established painter, Kafchin is known for her dreamscapes, which bridge the pastoral, the surrealist, and the techno-futuristic. Here, she returns to a multidisciplinary approach with a transfixing three-channel synchronized video. Through Different Eyes moves through a myriad of forms resembling vertebrate eyes, from human to feline to robot to cyborg. The optical shape also morphs into clumps of blood cells, strands of DNA, and planets, pointing out that these micro- and macro-domains of human knowledge have become quotidian images only through our use of machine prosthetics of vision. Intermittently, the "eyes" also become windows to other worlds, calling to mind the 1929 René Magritte painting The False Mirror, as well as the adage that eyes are the window to one's soul—affirming that we simultaneously see and are seen. Kafchin's work, which adds a third eye to the pair, complicates our fundamental sense of singular identity. Through Different Eyes evokes the pineal "third eye" buried in our evolutionary ancestry; the third eye in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other spiritual practices associated with enlightenment and higher consciousness; and the cartoon cliche of the three-eyed alien or monster. This new work broadens our quotidian perceptions of human culture, behavior, and biology into a cosmological and transhuman network—radically expanding a world that politics has made petty, violent, and diminutive. Through Different Eyes points to perception as a default state—the way in which humans, animals, and other forms of intelligence scan, focus, and gather information in order to interpret, imagine, and dream.