The feeling sonnets (transitional object)

As part of the Konstfesten, Metahaven’s film The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) will be shown at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, starting Thursday 11 February 2027.

When language fractures and meaning is not only destabilized but turned on its head, poetry may offer a way forward. In the thirty-two-minute film The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), Metahaven places poetry at the center of their practice, exploring its significance in both cinematic and cognitive terms. In a world shaped by AI chatbots and politically engineered rhetoric, they suggest, poetry can help us readdress the foundations of language. Rather than accepting words, sentences, and expressions at face value, it invites us to examine them closely and rebuild meaning through acts of defamiliarization.

Metahaven’s film The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) is an imaginative response to Eugene Ostashevsky’s poetry collection The Feeling Sonnets, weaving together essayistic and fictional motifs and patterns. The film follows the Dutch-speaking protagonist Amélie Haest as they listen to Ostashevsky’s narration through an invisible earpiece—an oblique reference to Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996). Haest also appears in two additional roles: as an English-speaking AI chatbot and as a French-speaking scientist who offers a framework for the film’s abstractions. Throughout Ostashevsky’s poetry, words, sentences, idioms, and poetic conventions are displaced and defamiliarized against shifting historical contexts and through the dynamics of (un)translatability. In turn, the film centers on the affective power of the transitional object—a stuffed toy red panda carried by Haest. The transitional object invites for itself to be read forward and backward like a palindrome, undoing the asymmetry imposed by the arrow of time.

Metahaven is the shared artistic persona of Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. Based in Amsterdam, the artist collective is known for their elusive aesthetic and groundbreaking interdisciplinary research. Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; ICA London; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia, Kyiv; e-flux, New York; and State of Concept, Athens, among others. They have also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Gwangju Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, and Ghost:2561 in Bangkok. In addition, their films have been screened at festivals and institutions including IFFR; Docs Against Gravity; CPH:DOX; the Museo Reina Sofía; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Their work is also held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Sharjah Art Foundation; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and several others.