| Alexandra BirckenA-ZConceived in close collaboration with the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and its curator Monika Bayer- Wermuth, the exhibition A–Zis presented as a sculptural vocabulary assembling more than sixty works, grouped according to formal and thematic similarities. The body and its different skins are at the heart of Alexandra Bircken’s sculptural and textile practice. Alongside her textile works, in which sewing, tearing, knitting, knotting and assemblage gestures predominate, Alexandra Bircken produces sculptures out of objects like motorcycles or mechanical parts: these are severed, cut and reassembled to better lay bare objects often associated with all-powerful masculinity. The artist also questions the relationship of bodies with machines, both the power that these give to human beings and the vulnerable position in which these place them. |
| Bianca BondiObjects as actantsBetween fairytale and apocalypse, Bianca Bondi’s installations and sculptures plunge the viewer into a universe both strange and familiar, where past, present and future intermix. As if in a waking dream or inner drift, her works suspend the boundaries between the astral and earthly worlds, realms of the living and the dead, the visible and invisible. Bianca Bondi masters the alchemy of the materials she uses. She is getting to know them more and more, but for the most part, the organic or inorganic objects she summons have their own life, beyond of all human control. Thus the “actant objects” evoked in the exhibition title—a term borrowed from philosopher Bruno Latour—remind us that every object is a fully-fledged actor of the world, in a political ecology that involves the co-evolution of all beings, human and nonhuman. This is the source of the fundamental unpredictability that is the driving force behind Bianca Bondi’s installations: substances parasitise them, and in so doing, establish relations, connect to one another, and create new alliances, with or without us. |
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