ALA LERESTEUX
Ala Leresteux’s work is a representation of an idea that what you want to be or pretend to be finally becomes you even though you think that you are the one in control.
The language (professional language or slang for example) you use daily is slowly shaping you as a person and one day when you look in the mirror you realize that you are not the person you used to be.
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ALAKINA MANN
These works are musings on the mind-body connection and how our internal world shapes our reality and self perception.
As much can be learned from what is not shown as what is, sexual parts of the body are hinted at but not depicted. There is A lack of wholeness and sense of fracture in a body wanting to be whole and seen. New shapes are made by this contortion and effort to hide parts of the whole.
There is also beauty in the many textures, morphing and blending, and in the mystery of parts seen and unseen.
AMALIA MOURAD
Amalia Mourad paints and draws daily human experiences, the subconscious, and intimate relationships. Mourad uses the figure and portraiture to explore sexuality, humor and emotion. Her paintings are an accumulation of characters and objects that have escaped from all different parts of her psyche. Mourad analyzes the meanings and symbolism behind each painting after it is completed.
ANNE KRAUSZ
Anne Krausz starts with photography, assembles portraits by overlaying them, and masks them with paint. The images go through a complete metamorphosis including several stages of pupation. Due to the diverse processes of overlaying, the focus goes from the physiognomy and visual appearance of the face, the cultural code it brings with it, to the emotion that the double and triple mask expresses. This creates a symbol as a cipher.
Das Ausgangsmateriel meiner Arbeiten ist die Fotografie. Ich montiere Portraits, verbinde diese durch Überlagerung und maskiere sie durch Farbauftrag. Die Bilder durchlaufen eine vollständige Metamorphose einschließlich mehrerer Verpuppungsstadien. Durch die vielfältigen Prozesse des Überlagerns geht das Augenmerk weg von der Physiognomie und optischen Erscheinung des Gesichts, dem kulturellen Code, den es mitbringt, hin zu der Emotion, die Doppelt- und Dreifachmaske auszudrücken scheint. So entsteht ein Symbol als Chiffre.
AUBREY HEICHEMER
Drowse is an immersive experience made after an out of body experience due to illness. Attempting to give a sense of the space of lost control and dependency on the mechanics of health as you slowly try to reconnect with the soft tissues that connect.
The XR Coven is a womxn run collective based in Berlin working on immersive educational experiences, that deal with often sensationalized or forbidden aspects of the intimate, to promote wisdom and dignity over secrecy.
BEN MEYER
Ben Meyer used oil paint as a tool to veil an existing print work and therefore making it more personal. It highlights the shapes of the body and surrounding spaces, while also hiding details. The mix of abstraction and realistic depiction is what Meyer finds interesting, as well as influencing the otherwise passive image consumption
In diesem Bild benutze ich Übermalung um ein existierendes Bild zu verschleiern und dabei persönlicher zu machen. Es hebt die Form von Körpern hervor während es gleichzeitig darunter liegendes verschwindet lässt. Die Mischung von Abstraktion und realistischer Darstellung interessiert mich dabei, sowie das Eingreifen in ansonsten passive Prozesse beim Konsum von Bildern.
BHAVNA SHIVAYOGIMATH
Bhavna Shivayogimath is interested in exploring the relationship between internal and external spaces, in relation to the self. This art piece depicts external elements occupying the internal space and paralysing the physical. This idea of restraint is juxtaposed against the title of the work 'Weekend', a word that refers to one's free time.
CAMILLE THÈODET
Camille Théodet is interested in the human, the body, the emotions, and the spirit. Their work is a representation, very personal, of the interaction of a human with themselves, and aims to consider it as a "neutral" entity.
Influenced by the classics, dramatics, and religious paintings of the masters, Camille creates a new interpretation of the human, in a different aesthetic. They show the fragile side of the human, in all it's sensuality, out of the real world.
CHARLIE STEIN
Charlie Stein examines the limits and possibilities of painting in the digital age. By combining doll-like, robotic forms and found pictorial material with a profound understanding of art history, especially the history of German painting, Stein’s process raises questions about our place in a post-human world.
CHARLOTTE DE BEKKER
As someone who dissociates from their body often, Charlotte de Bekker learned to re-ground themselves into their body using a number of techniques. One of these techniques is a type of meditation called Vipassana, which is based around the process of doing mental body-scans.
While learning how to re-ground, Charlotte started to work on and develop the ability to single out and focus on very specific areas within the body. They started to paint the sensations of these isolated body parts. Then began to use this process of painting not only to capture the current state of their body's interior, but to imagine the state that they would like that interior to become.
DORA RAGUSA
Often the struggles that take place inside ourselves, hidden deep down in the darkest corners of our mind, don’t have a clear shape or structure and are hard to define.
Through the black and white, high contrast charcoal drawings Dora Ragusa aims to embody and bring out into the light these creatures that live in the abyss inside of us. But these creatures are quite often the opposite of how we look on the outside...
EMMA WEIRD
Emma Weird explores problematic expectations and assumptions surrounding the nude body and aims to liberate this from the patriarchal male gaze, serving as a platform to elevate queer beauty.
Emma works with bold, colorful, acrylics to achieve this. Their work is inspired by the relationship – or lack of – between identities and nude bodies.
ERIKA CLUGSTON
A girl’s leg hair glistens in the desert sun, soft to the touch, until one day she picks up a razor-blade and draws it across her skin. Each hair grows back thicker, sharper, in defense of this body she’s taught to be at war with. In the aftermath of puberty, her prickly legs are transformed into a political weapon, a symbol of non-conformance to the rules governing this body. She gives up on sucking in her belly and lets the flesh expand, unfold, and take up space she didn’t know was hers. Now, like a cactus in bloom, she turns to nature to reclaim her body — to love her prickly pear-shape figure and protect her claim to this flesh.
ESTHER SAMUELS-DAVIS
Gusto is an original drawing of one of Esther Samuel- Davis Feel Good Gods, a collection of 25 self-help gods that come as a deck of cards. "Gusto" comes with a little description of who they are and how they can be there for you attached to the back of their frame.
Mind over Matter is about all the life that lives inside our heads, and the beautiful little gardens we can cultivate in there.
JAN ZIEGLER
Jan’s portrait works resemble afterimages of random encounters and appeal to the viewer’s unconscious perception. They seem placeless and bestow a mysteriously vacuos, almost hermetic sense of atmosphere.
The work Early summer failures is part of a series of paintings exploring human faces by trying to express emotional conditions to be found behind outer appearance. A moment of abstraction allows ambiguous feelings that fluctuate between romance and ratio and do not exclude the strange and grotesque.
JANA MARIE CARIDDI
The piece Vanity is a non-conventional vanity.
The features trapped inside the mirror are apathetically adorning motifs and accessories that reference a simpler time.
While echoing memories of girlhood, there is a harsh reality where the rose colored glasses of girlhood come off, and we're left with our own self image looking back at us.
JARED LONG
Jared Long’s work is about feelings and relationships.
Long doesn’t come into a piece with an idea, instead he focuses on capturing the feelings of the model and letting those feelings grow into an artwork on their own.
JOANNA MORTREUX
Joanna Mortreux’s work deals with the ideas of constraint and transformation.
In restricting to oil paint on AluDibond Mortreux explores the tension, fragility and the process of construction of a monument/sculpture while all the while being stuck in 2D form. Museum sculptures, monuments unmoving, geological formations; all this imagery across multiple time frames are referenced within the work with an exploration of the idea of being formed, of attempting to go beyond the forms and materials we are made of.
Kovalenko Ekaterina
The main themes of Ekaterina's projects are human, physicality and sensuality, reflection on the perversion and narrow-mindedness of society, taboo and stigmatisation.
This project is dedicated to the perception of what we call "usefull".
JOHANNA GROTZE
The linocut offers Johanna Grotzke the opportunity an image superimposed to print the real motive to alienate. The process between perception and mindset.
Grotzke is inspired by computer games at low resolution, but also of glitches in film and photography.
Der Linolschnitt bietet mir die Möglichkeit ein Bild übereinander zu drucken um das eigentliche Motiv zu entfremden. Der Prozess zwischen der Wahrnehmung und Denkweise interessiert mich dabei.
Inspirieren lasse ich mich von Computerspielen mit niedriger Auflösung, aber auch von Störimpulsen beim Film und in der Fotografie.
LENA ADER
Lena Ader gives form and visibility to emotions. The inner state is told through the body with the help of gestures.
The series "the tired animal" deals with exhaustion and the feeling of inability to act. In contrast, however, also with security, connectedness and care.
Lena Ader gist is ihrer Malerei Zuständen und Emotionen eine Form und macht sie dadurch sichtbar. Ein inneres Bild wird so durch den Körper an sich und mit Hilfe seiner Gesten erzählt.
Die Serie "das müde Tier" befasst sich einerseits mit Erschöpfung und dem Gefühl der Handlungsunfähigkeit. Im Gegensatz dazu aber auch mit Geborgenheit, Verbundenheit und Fürsorge.
LINDSEY DODGE
“Hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused.
Cloudy or cloudlike.
Of or resembling a nebula or nebulae in deep space; nebular.”
Humans are products of their communities, geographies, gender, sexuality, DNA, history, experiences, trauma, feelings, otherness, sameness, and energy. This group exhibition explores the boundaries that separate how people think about and depict the body: a reflection of the fluid areas between our outward appearance and how that conflicts or corresponds with our inner psyche.
LUCIO CATHEXIS
Lucio Cathexis’s pictorial work evolved from portraits to simpler structures, the figures were gradually disintegrating into organic and crude formations.
Giving to the physical existence of the characters a different meaning, a new role in a new primitive living shape. It keeps the human essence represented on faces but having a new contextualization where it's stripped from the body, history, and representation. Still, under these circumstances, evolution tries to manage its own survival strategies of adaptation in this new reality. Cathexis’s work is to show a simplification of the human being in a primary and pure state.
MAUD TUTSCHE
The language of love is elementary and necessary for understanding. Despite closeness we can remain strangers to each other or despite foreignness we can be close to each other. The Rosetta Stone here stands for foreignness, but also for the possibility to learn to read the other in love.
Die Sprache (der Liebe) ist elementar und notwendig für ein Verstehen. Trotz Nähe können wir uns fremd bleiben oder trotz Fremdheit können wir uns nah sein.
Der Stein der Rosetta steht hier für Fremdheit, aber auch für die Möglichkeit in der Liebe den anderen lesen zu lernen.
MIRA VARG
Through combining objects and symbols, of which the outside world would not think to link, Mira Varg creates an alternative universe.
Dreams and fantasies are transformed into the photographic image.
PAOLO BANDINU
Paolo Bandinu is interested in the continuous becoming of things. His works reflect the changing of different moments that are in suspension, in a sort of precarious balance between past and present, and future.
Through paintings he conveys the idea of a trace that leaves a mark. This mark anticipates what follows and may stay undone but it already contains the pattern of what will come next. The paintings thus become only a passing surface, where the changing of the images does not aim at a final result but only testifies to the transition and leaves a trace which immortalises fleetingly the moment passing.
In the paintings a set of symbols and simple scenes of life become elusive and changeable and are sublimated by a dreamlike vision, a theatre of shadows and evanescent figures in the suspension of becoming, every single mark and gesture is crystallised in the moment of change and indecision, on the boundary which separates reality from the imagination's vortex.
SHANNON LEWIS
Shapeshifting is an adaptation. It is the work that we do to be able to move between spaces, classes and geographies. The perpetual reshaping plays with notions of making and unmaking. This strategy is purposely evasive and disallows the embedding of binaries.
Here, fragmentation isn’t a stage to overcome; it’s a place of anarchic rethinking and potential opportunity.
SOPHIE IREMONGER
Sophie Iremonger's work explores power, evolution, nature, and landscape.
Iremonger uses a variety of mediums to articulate her thoughts and feelings, including paint, drawing, and collage.
STELLA MERIS
In the painting process Stella Meris became aware of her body's vulnerability not only as a weakness but also as a strength. The colours emphasize the vitality that Meris experiences in the practical work with her body. The figure is embedded in an imaginative colour space that shows chaos and easiness.
VALERIA SANGUINI
cristo nano 2018 is a vertical slice through the chromatic spectrum identifying the presence of a body. This work is quoting the work of Hans Holbein the Younger the body of Christ dead in the tomb. Valeria Sanguini's interesting perspective brings on the operating table of Painting, the avatar par excellence, body and metaphor of a dialogue between the visible and the invisible in the Christian tradition and icon of the Western art, capable of disembodying and incarnating. Finally to dissect it, to reduce it to matter in the matter of light, in an open process .
Cristo nano 2018 ist ein vertikaler Schnitt durch das Farbspektrum, zitiert das Werk von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren Der Leib des im Grab gestorbenen Christus. Es erschien mir notwendig, den Avatar par excellence, Metapher eines Dialogs zwischen dem Sichtbaren und dem Unsichtbaren in der christlichen Tradition und Ikone der westlichen Kunst, Körper der fähig ist, sich zu entleiben und zu inkarnieren, auf den OP-Tisch der Malerei zu bringen, sie zu sezieren, sie in einem offenen Prozess auf die Materie des Lichts zu reduzieren.
WAF
Being a queer person in Tunisia is a big challenge. This work is about creating a temporary safe space for Tunisian queer people to express themselves about their body awareness and the sense of boundaries.
They try to overpass the limits of social rules conditioning gender by the transfiguration of their ideas of self in a performative way.