RHIZOME - IMAGES OF THOUGHT

In her colourful collages, pictures, prints, and sculptures, Nana Mandl(*1991 Graz, AT) develops possible visual transformations and translations of the challenges and the excessive demands of today's media. Her haptic collages combine elements of painting, embroidery and drawing with forms of the communicative and representative spheres of advertising, fashion and social media. Her multilayered works also reflect the globalized patchwork society in which we are living in today.

Nana Mandl, don't be so fucking nostalgic babe, 2016, Mixed Media on Canvas, 190 x 130 cm, 74 3/4 x 51 1/8 in

The American artist and filmmaker Jillian Mayer (*1986 Miami, US) explores how the digital world affect our lives, bodies and identities. She investigates the points of tension between our online and physical worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two.

I Am Your Grandma is an autobiographical video diary log that Mayer records for her unborn grandchildren. The work challenges notions of mortality, celebrity, and the universal impetus for creation and legacy. By placing the video in a public forum (Youtube) Mayer conducts a phenomenological study of why people ultimately share their personal feelings with anonymous strangers. 

Mayer presents a YouTube video with a makeup tutorial that teaches viewers how to hide from cameras and facial recognizing algorithms. “We all know that cameras are watching our every step,” warns Mayer. The implementation of this makeup tutorial in your everyday life will be key to existing track free.

The paintings of Tali Lennox (*1993 London, UK) are links and mediators between our real-life sphere and the spiritual one. Her impressive portraits draw parallels between German art of the 1920s and of the current 2020s. Lennox describes in particular the latter as a time of political and ecological decline, which captures the glittering escapism in a time of impending uncertainty. The people portrayed in Lennox's work are mostly strangers whom she meets on the streets of New York and then photographs in a staged fashion that matches their stories.

The sculptures by the artist Siggi Sekira (*1987 Odessa, UA) reinterpret Slavic mythology and investigate the coexistence of paganism and Christianity in rural, post- Soviet Ukraine. Pottery is exemplary of Ukrainian folk traditions and a form of cultural expression of the working class. With her sculptures, Sekira creates her own worlds alongside our present-day society and shows two works from the series „The Eve of Nymphs", which are based on the Slavic fertility ritual of Ivan Kupala.