Körper Speicher Tempel

archive-single-exhibition-detail.php

Susanne Ring’s artistic practice encompasses figurative sculpture, painting and drawing. She combines elements from this diverse pool with furniture, fabrics, or materials to create expansive installations, depending on the local conditions. Her ceramic sculptures are like vessels that are filled with content contingent on context – enigmatic creatures made of fired clay that move boldly on thin stilted legs at the boundary between statics and materiality. Readable as physical figures through simple features such as heads, arms and legs, the sculptures nevertheless go beyond any prototypical body image in their open hybrid appearance. As thin-walled containers, many-headed with small antennae-like arms or pointed white milk teeth, they seismographically capture projections and resistances and invite empathic exploration. In their disparate presence, they question normative notions of beauty, binary or non-binary attributions, optimisation and regulatory constraints and literally embody the right to non-identity and ambivalence. Ring’s unmistakable sculptural vocabulary forms a sculptural language that not only speaks about bodies, but be­comes a body itself – not as an “integral whole, but as a con­struct that also recognises itself as such” (Stefan Lüddemann). Her hybrid, sensitive bodies – latently dangerous system disruptors – stand in the space individually or as a group formation, endowed with an ambivalent power of strength and fragility, of activity, need for help, and sovereignty.

curated by Veronika Witte

Connected events: