Iron Stream by Salvador Marino
SA 07.03.2026 - SUN 05.04.2026
Opening: FRI 06.03.2026 18H-22H
ACUD Galerie
Opening hours:
THU-SUN
15H-19H
Blood donation helps save lives. Donating blood not only benefits others but also provides health for the donor. Regular donation can also have health benefits, such as improving heart health and regulating iron levels. Additionally, blood donations are critical for maintaining an adequate supply in hospitals and blood banks. When receiving blood in a hospital, it’s important to know that the blood often comes from multiple donors. Red blood cells, plasma, and platelets may be sourced from different individuals, ensuring that patients receive the right treatment. This collective effort from various donors makes it possible to meet the needs of many people.
Red Cross, World Health Organization & Red Crescent Societies.
Global revenues from blood and blood-derived products continue to grow steadily. The global blood product market was valued at approximately USD 38.16 billion in 2024, with projections estimating it will reach USD 54.43 billion by 2031, reflecting sustained expansion within the medical and biotechnology industry.
Blood Product Market Size, Share, and Forecast. Verified Market Research. 2024.
The loss of innocence does not begin with the awareness that one is mortal, nor even with the awareness that others are. It begins with the intuition that we kill to survive. That we are carnivores. Even more so, wildly omnivorous, devourers of all that is alive. That survival depends on learning to kill the beauty that surrounds us.
Paul B. Preciado (2020). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press.
Iron Stream is a performative installation that examines the blood industry as an opaque capitalist infrastructure where technology, morality, and war intersect.
Blood donations are commonly promoted through the moral argument that “blood saves lives”. While the life-saving capacity of blood transfusions is well established, Iron Stream asks a more complicated question: whose lives are saved, and at the cost of which others? The manufacturing of consent for political projects, including in the blood industry, often relies on moral frameworks. Morality bridges the individual and the collective, unmasking a confusing relationship between personal willpower and the capitalist instrumentalization of individual human choice.
A necropolitical mechanism is maintained not only through the strategic deployment of moral narratives, but also through the fetishization of technology. Iron Stream evokes autonomous life, and displays the contemporary entanglement of war, the erotic, and the capitalist death drive: a mechanism of increasing efficiency and control.
By activating uncanny and sci-fi-inspired technological objects, visually reminiscent of medical machines, Iron Stream exposes the connections between the individual materiality of blood and broader systems of power. It presents a continuous choreography between bodies, fluids, and machines that discloses the vicious management of life and death under capitalism.
CREDITS
Concept, Artistic Direction, and Technical Development: Salvador Marino
Performance: Gh0re.grl and Cru Encarnação
Text: Salvador Marino and Cru Encarnação
Flyer Design: Salvador Marino
EXTENDED CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Aleksy Domke — Support with 3D Design, PCB Development, and Engineering
Eva Igver and Annick Durán Kandzior — Assistance and fabrication Support
veronika.yad and 11v151131_M06 — AI Image Support
Philipp Kramer — PCB Supervision
Johannes Thiel — Support in sourcing critical materials
Daniel Leber — Support with steel plates
Colette Patterson & Brad Nath — For their continued support and care
along the way
⌘ Hosted by ACUD Galerie ⌘
ACUD Galerie is funded by the Basisförderung der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.