In Cypher, HYENAZ uphold the hyena—a creature maligned as grotesque—as a totem of queer survival. The work unravels a love story spun through the animal’s mythos: its androgynous physiology, its scavenging, its supposed ugliness as a testament to thriving at the margins.
Graysister (Dušan Pejčić)’s video distills this ethos into a flesh-and-pixel psalm. The artists’ faces and bodies fuse into a luminous, three-breasted hybrid—part human, part apparition. Limbs and bones blur, and genders dissolve into a radiant monstrosity that defies categorization.
Through distortion and desire, Cypher weaponizes the hyena’s vilified traits—scavenging becomes resourcefulness, androgyny becomes multiplicity, ugliness becomes a radical self-acceptance. Here, love is not pristine communion but a feral pact.
