As part of Lictundfire Gallery’s 10-Year anniversary exhibition, Theseus’s Craft: The Paradox of the Real is a conceptual continuation of the previous two exhibitions, interlaced with the myth of Ariadne, and based on the character of her interim lover Theseus- per the myth, the son of King Aegeus of Athens.
According to the myth, the legendary trireme, a three-rowed galley that the Cretan Princess Ariadne and Theseus departed Crete in after he had slain his half-brother, a dangerous, human-eating minotaur, was preserved by the Athenians. Each year, the citizens of Athens would honor Theseus’s act of rescuing Athenian children who were destined to be fed to the Minotaur by a Pilgrimage to the Island of Delos, where he had gone after leaving Crete. Over the centuries, to preserve the ship, the Athenians replaced its decaying planks with new ones, to keep the memory of their hero alive and the symbol of his victory intact in his honor.
This paradox raises questions of loss, replacement, transformation,and the question of identity and reality. The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, questions whether an object, here the ship, is the same object after having all of its original parts exchanged with newer ones.
Artists include: Angelica Bergamini, Gianluca Bianchino, Rachael Bohlander, Macyn Bolt, Krystyna Borkowska, Graciela Cassel, Maureen Catbagan, Stephen Cimini, Andréa DeFelice, Maura Falfan, Gordon Fearey, David Friedman, Alitza Cardona + Otero Fuentes, Maki Hajikano, Deming King Harriman, Gosha Karpowicz, Bernard Klevickas, Dante Migone-Ojeda, Tony Moore, Arezoo Moseni, Jonathan Peyser, Kristin Reed, Jane Sangerman, Jeff Schneider, Kriti Siderakis, Barbara Trachtenberg.
Curated by Hayley Ferber & Priska Juschka
Concept by Priska Juschka
Exhibition dates: January 10 – January 31, 2026