Nelly Naminasenko at B25 Gallerie, Frankfurt Höchst

In Gloriforms, Nelly Naminasenko turns to angelology not as a theology of beings but as a speculative discipline—one that speaks from the edges of ontology, where the boundaries of what counts as “real” blur and futures appear as suspended possibilities rather than fulfilled promises. Her angels do not descend from heaven with certitude. They arrive instead as spectral figures of an interrupted providence, emissaries from a cosmological order that has long since faltered. 



The exhibition approaches angelology through the prism of hauntology: angels are not divine guarantees but the ghosts of a messianic horizon that never fully arrived. They are metaphysical messengers transformed into displaced administrators—remnants of a divine bureaucracy whose political and liturgical functions survive only in fragmentary rituals of praise and loss. They are, in other words, monuments to an order without power, officials of a providence whose infrastructure has been withdrawn. 

In contemporary philosophy, the angel often marks the Other of the human: pure praise, pure vocation, pure mission. Yet Christian eschatology anticipates a collapse of this border. “In the resurrection,” readers of scripture are told, “they abide as angels of God.” In that moment, the angelic ceases to be a figure of separation and becomes an image of human destiny—a citizenship not conferred by state or economy but by participation in a hymnological hierarchy. The celestial is political; the angelic is liturgical. Worship becomes a form of governance, and governance becomes the praise of what Giorgio Agamben calls “the inoperative.” Hierarchy is no longer domination but harmonization: the cosmos as choir. 



From Pseudo-Dionysius to Kafka, angels and bureaucrats have long mirrored one another—both intermediaries, both enforcers of cryptic decrees, both caught between command and interpretation. In Gloriforms, this parallel reaches its haunting conclusion. What remains of the hierarchy after the end of divine governance? Only the doxology, the song without a singer, the liturgy detached from its officiants. As Agamben observes, “The hierarchy is a hymnology.” When the order collapses, what survives is the music. 

This vision resonates powerfully with one of the great angelic images of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” hurled forward by the storm of progress, eyes fixed on the wreckage accumulating at its feet. Naminasenko’s angels share this suspended posture—caught between being and image, presence and absence, command and yearning. They confront us with the pathos of figures condemned to witness history without the power to intervene. 

But they are not merely passive witnesses. The angel is also the spectator of suffering: denied compassion, tasked with observing divine justice as spectacle. Here, angelology intersects with the aesthetics of power. As Foucault taught, spectacle is woven into the machinery of control, and the angels—once glorious—become implicated in systems of surveillance and judgment. In Gloriforms, they appear as eternal civil servants of an exhausted cosmology, the last loyal employees in an abandoned celestial office. 

The exhibition also draws on Mark Fisher’s hauntological insight: that our age is haunted less by the past than by the futures that failed to arrive. Angels become shadows of the inactual—bearers of the unmanifest, witnesses to all that might have been but never materialized. Naminasenko’s figures seem to carry the residue of missing alternatives, unrealized utopias, and arrested histories. Angelology becomes, in this sense, a discipline of resistance: an attempt to speak the unspoken, to give form to the spectral outlines of unchosen timelines. 

All works in Gloriforms were generated with Midjourney, an AI-based image synthesis platform. This choice is not incidental. Midjourney operates as a contemporary Pseudo-Dionysius, mediating a visual hierarchy through prompts, probabilities, and machinic inference. Its images emerge not from painting, photography, or modeling, but from summoning—an act that mirrors the angelic condition itself. These angels are neither entirely authored nor fully autonomous; they hover between human intention and machine dreaming. 

The resulting visual field is uncanny: faces that almost coalesce, wings that dissolve into noise, vestments that shimmer with digital luminosity. Their eeriness speaks to the ghostly nature of both medium and message. In this shared space—where algorithmic imagination meets ancient liturgy—we encounter angels not as figures of certainty, but as emissaries from the threshold of what cannot be fully seen or fully known. 

Gloriforms invites viewers into a hymnology of the inoperative, a liturgy of the unfulfilled, a politics of the spectral. Through these AI-generated phantasms, Nelly Naminasenko asks what remains of the sacred when its machinery falls silent, and what kind of glory persists when glory itself becomes a form without content. 

 

https://www.thehypemagazine.com/2025/12/05/nelly-naminasenko-at-b25-gallerie-frankfurt-hochst/?fsp_sid=331