Eight columns of amber-gold resin stand upright on steel armatures in the main gallery at Management, New York — and inside each one, a stripped Christmas tree trunk is suspended like a specimen from an alternate natural history. The branches have been cut. The bark is dissolving. What remains is a body caught between states: not dead, not preserved, but entombed in a material that mimics geological time while smelling faintly of industrial chemistry.

This is Jura Shust's Außerkörperliche Erfahrung — an out-of-body experience staged not for humans, but for spirits. The Belarusian-born, Berlin-based artist has long worked at the friction point between indigenous Slavic cosmologies and the operational logic of contemporary technology. The central sculptural work, Leaving an Annual Growth at the Top: Succession (2024), takes eight discarded Christmas trees — objects of festive commerce, ritually consumed and discarded — and subjects them to a process that oscillates "between care and exploitation, preservation and capture." The trunks are encapsulated in synthetic resin, their severed branches a gesture that "once carried meaning, now repeated as an automated action."

There is something profoundly unnerving about these columns. They glow — amber tones ranging from pale honey at the edges to burnt sienna at the core, where organic matter has bled into the resin like an ink stain in slow motion. They recall both scientific specimen jars and reliquary vessels. The steel supports are clinical, deliberately cold. They hold the resin tubes like instruments in a laboratory, or candles in a cathedral.

Shust draws on the concept of the sacred grove — a space that indigenous cultures of Northern and Eastern Europe perceived as a temple. But this is no nostalgic revival. "The cuts encrypt a message in a language that has been forgotten. A future ritual becomes the interface that might decrypt the archive." The cemetery, in Shust's cosmology, is a database. The root system of the spruce spreads horizontally, close to the surface, and in a gust of wind, it is often the first to fall.

On the adjacent walls, relief panels push this logic further. Generated by prompting a large language model to define its own anatomy, the works are machine-sculpted from spruce wood, activated with black soil, and sealed in resin. The results — biomorphic forms resembling MRI cross-sections or fossilized neural maps — hover between the anatomical and the geological. For Breath-filled glass crown (2025), the LLM was trained on MRI images of the artist's brain, translating neurological activity into speculative architectures of consciousness.

What makes Shust's practice so compelling is its refusal to treat technology and animism as opposites. The exhibition points toward a condition in which technology emerges as an autonomous agent integrated with natural systems. The resin columns are not metaphors. They are devices — ritual interfaces for a world that has forgotten its own cosmological infrastructure. The trees inside them are not dead. They are waiting.