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Throughput is the rate at which material passes through a system. In computing, it measures data surviving transmission. In manufacturing, it measures bodies converted into product. In biology, it measures what an organism can process before it is overwhelmed. In every case, throughput assumes a system, an input, and an output. In every case, something is lost in the processing. Working with kunyit (turmeric), copper, bone black, resin, and the architectures of machine learning, the works assembled here ask what happens when life passes through the apparatus. A rhizome hangs inside a gutted computer case, drying slowly across the duration of the exhibition. Electromagnetic signals are translated through copper and kunyit into audible sound. Machine learning diagrams are hand-engraved into aluminum and inked with pigment made from charred bone. A projector screen, rubbed with kunyit like kāṣāya cloth, glows with blank light. Each work undoes the machine from within and opens it to what was never meant to be accounted for.

Kunyit stains the surfaces it touches. It leaves evidence of contact that cannot be optimized away. The yellow is botanical and racial, medicinal and sacred, a color used to heal bodies and used to mark them. In Malay, kunyit is also a slur for queer bodies. Positioned not as subject matter but as method, kunyit diffracts through boundaries. Between organism and machine. Between mysticism and materiality. Between the diasporic body and the technological infrastructure that processes it. They are material encounters in which life and apparatus co-produce each other, and in which neither emerges unchanged.

Throughput, in the language of systems, is always less than what was theoretically possible. There is always loss, latency, friction. But what the measurement cannot capture is what persists despite the processing. In a moment when legislative and technological apparatuses are reconfiguring which bodies count, which lives are recognized, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to exist, this exhibition offers no resolution. It offers instead the evidence of passage. Kunyit on screen, bone in metal, a rhizome inside a machine. Life, seeping through.