Anicka Yi
Karmic Debt
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Anicka Yi has a knack for the otherworldly. Whether through scentscapes or animatronic sculptures that restructure our relationship to the world, she continually crafts environments that unsettle the linguistic distinctions between the natural and artificial. In “Karmic Debt,” her recent solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, undulating machinic sculptures from Yi’s Radiolaria series (2023–24) were showcased alongside a generative video projection. For this two-part exhibition, the artist continued to address urgent technological and scientific concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) as well as the Capitalocene, proposing debt less as a transactional concept figured in negation and more as a geopoetics grounded in existential exchange between human and nonhuman entities. Through these sumptuous works, she asked: What do we owe the world? What do we owe each other?