Author: Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

The Game of Laura 

On the Work(ld) of Laura Kärki

Written by Natasha Marzliak, art critic, curator, and studio manager

When I first encountered Laura Kärki, a Finnish artist based in Berlin, in 2024 at VBK (Verein Berliner Künstler), one work captured my attention: Sweetheart (2024). A robot vacuum transformed into a hybridobject -composed of ceramics, glazes, textile prints, mixed crochet, and filling material – radiated joy through its saturated colors while destabilizing formal expectations. The piece carried a sense of humor, yet it is not naive; its wit is measured and ambivalent. What first appeared light was anchored, quite literally, by the weight of its ceramic components painted in black, a grounded counterpoint to the cheerful palette. Ceramics curtail the mobility embedded in the robot vacuum’s original function; rather than circulate freely through space, Kärki’s hybrid creature is immobilized and fixed in place.

The work enacts the embedded architectures of expectation – those that guide conduct, dictate domestic routines, and render certain bodies legible only within normative matrices. For women, childhood memories of play – often structured around chores and implicit social codes -surface not as nostalgia but as structural logic: care, responsibility, and ritual are inscribed in the object’s form, its weight, and its configuration. Sweetheart becomes a material diagram of constraint, a tactile map of gendered circulation and the invisible burden of domestic expectation. The domestic device – typically associated with a sanitized, frictionless functionality – is transformed into something dense, resistant, and oddly vulnerable. Kärki sidesteps predictable tropes of feminist commentary by refusing melodrama. Instead, she stages the problem materially: constraint presents itself as a physical condition, revealing how women’s bodies are shaped, slowed, and contained by expectations that appear innocuous.

Central to her practice is the notion of “the game”: her works operate as propositions in which play is not a theme but a method and a strategy. In Sweetheart, elements of childhood play are present -soft textures, crafted surfaces -yet the game is structurally rigged. The pleasure of touch coexists with the impossibility of movement; the impulse toward interaction meets a quiet divergence from the object itself. Kärki stages a game whose rules we, women, recognize intuitively, because they are inherited through social conditioning, yet she alters the parameters just enough to expose their arbitrariness. This modulation becomes a tactical demonstration: the object enacts constraint, proposes by withholding, and reveals through absence.

This strategy is potent precisely because it does not critique from the outside. Kärki works within the symbolic vocabulary of domestic life – toys, appliances, decorative techniques -introducing disruptions that operate from within. Crochet, printing, and ceramics, historically tied to gendered labor, are recomposed into structures that neither obey utility nor fully abandon it. They function as traps disguised as invitations: objects that generate friction while confronting the viewer with inertia and hesitation.

The concept of the game becomes even clearer when considered alongside other works in her practice. On November 2nd, during Schöneberger Art 2025, I visited her studio and encountered pieces such as A Wild Boar in Grunewald Forest(2022), Tattered Children Room Teddy Bear (2024), An Embarrassed Guinea Pig (2024), and Bastard (2024), among others of equal significance. The studio’s arrangement allowed each work to stand as a distinct entity while entering into a network of relations between gesture, memory, and materiality. Here, too, the game manifests not as entertainment but as structural strategy: inherited rules, choreographies of behavior coded as natural, and the quiet forms of sabotage that Kärki introduces to make their mechanics visible.

There is a surface softness in Kärki’s pieces, made palpable through threads, fabrics, tufts, and crochet. Yet this tactile immediacy only partially conceals a deeper undercurrent: a murmur of containment, invisibility, and stories truncated before they fully emerge. Her figures move within a delicate oscillation between levity and gravity, presence and erasure, mnemonic trace and invented memory. What appears playful becomes charged with critical ambivalence, exposing the instability of recollection itself. The resulting tension evokes the fractured temporality of childhood imprint, where perception is dispersed, recursive, and always on the verge of slipping into multiplicity – a multiplicity that reflects remembrance and also the multiple vectors of social, cultural, and affective forces that shape subjectivity.

Many works exist in two, three, or more versions, nearly identical yet never the same. Each iteration sharpens difference and discernment. Every deviation in tufts, stitches, and crochet produces a shifting field of possibility, suggesting memory is never stable but always reconstituted. The saturated colors, bold outlines, and ambiguous expressions combine critical subtlety with an almost baroque exuberance: layered compositions, dense textures, and chromatic intensity turn each object into a miniature theater. The outlines and ambiguous expressions generate a mode of looking oscillating between immediacy and reflection, combining subtle critique with a vibrancy refusing closure. Each object becomes a site where micro-narratives emerge and recede, foregrounding the fragmentary, the minor, and the overlooked. Kärki’s poetics embraces this instability, inviting a perception attuned to Zeit as conceptualized by Benjamin and Husserl: both layered, fragmentary, and charged with potential (Benjamin), and simultaneously experienced, retentive, and anticipatory, shaped by consciousness itself (Husserl). Kärki’s sculptures instantiate this dual temporality, producing a field where affect, reminiscence, and relationality emerge in their full complexity, resisting the flattening velocity of contemporary visual culture. They demand a tempo of attention that is relational, recursive, and never fully captured, an apprehension calibrated to notice the subtle oscillations, deviations, and resonances that define lived experience.

Kärki constructs a poetics of touch and variation, where materiality and thought intersect. Her sculptures, often toy-like, are not exercises in nostalgia; they decelerate cognition within the logic of accelerated visual culture. Her work retrieves subjectivity diminished by hyperreality, AI-driven systems, and speeded visual consumption, creating spaces for attentive engagement and discovery. Each piece subtly resists the dominance of efficiency and uniformity, reaffirming the value of human gesture, imperfection, and nuance. Her practice is simultaneously intimate and expansive, playful and analytical, generating conditions for reflection, recognition, and imaginative inhabitation.

The artist’s approach embodies a capacity that nurtures the critical potential of art: to pause, to dwell in affect. In an era dominated by homogenized rhythms and algorithmic leveling, her practice affirms the value of slowness, tactility, and the singularity of experience. In Berlin and beyond, I hope to encounter more works of this kind -those that compel us to decelerate, offering an invitation to pause, a gentle interruption to the relentless, runaway pace of post-modern life. At the close of our studio visit, she presented a small rug, suggesting it might be placed beside one’s bed to initiate the day differently: embodied and attuned to possibility – a practical, poetic recalibration of perception. This gesture crystallizes the “game” Kärki stages: its rules are discovered through touch, attention, and the oscillation between expectation and deviation. The game is neither mere play nor entertainment; it operates as a mechanism of critical engagement, rendering the familiar strange and the overlooked legible.

You can explore more of Laura Kärki’s work on her website: http://www.laurakarki.com

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. 2010. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. In Werke und Nachlass. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band 19. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 

Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Faksimilenachdruck der Erstausgabe von 1928. Herausgegeben und mit einem Kommentar von Roland Reuß. Göttingen: Wallstein. 

Benjamin, Walter. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Hrsg. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English translation: The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.) 

Husserl, Edmund. 2000 (orig. 1928). Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. Halle a. d. S.: Max Niemeyer. (3. A., unveränderter Nachdruck der Erstausgabe von 1928.) 

Reveries by Sanges

Opening: 20 November 2025 | Exhibition runs until 15 January 2025

In Reveries, Sanges invites viewers to cross the delicate line between reality and imagination, presenting a selection of photographs that float between the possible, the dreamlike, and the uncanny. The exhibition creates a visual landscape of gentle confusion and wonder, where the everyday becomes absurd and new visions softly appear.

Through sharp portraits, surreal compositions, busy group scenes, and moments where viewers become voyeurs, Sanges constructs worlds that feel both familiar yet subtly altered. Each im- age becomes a fragment of a “woken dream,” a suspended moment where reality dissolves. With rigorous attention to light, colour, and form, his works are calibrated to both enchant and destabilise.

Each photograph unfolds as a staged cinematic tableau, where every figure is orchestrated with the deliberate precision of a film director. Sanges’ characters are poised, inhabiting settings that contrast opulence with decay, creating tense, theatrical spaces. Echoes of Helmut Newton’s elegance meet the surreal wit of Man Ray. Each figure engages in intricate movements, and their poses add ambiguity and drama.

While Sanges has long explored the technical possibilities of digital photography, his practice remains deeply and unshakably rooted in the analogue. All the works presented in Reveries are shot entirely on film. In resisting the instantaneous perfection of the digital, Sanges embraces the slow alchemy of analog photography, where light and time are interwoven with artistic intent.

Building on this foundation, Reveries continues Sanges’ exploration of dreamlike states and psychological landscapes, expanding themes developed in his earlier series Wunderkamera, Circumstances, Polaroids, Big Scenes, and, indeed, Reveries itself.

Mattia Martinelli, director of Robertaebasta, and Giorgia Zen, gallery manager, have expressed great excitement for this upcoming display. Zen, who was first struck by Sanges’ talent, reflects on his imagery:”It is the sensation that lingers upon waking from a dream, an instant when reality feels suspended. Was it real? Did I dream it? Or am I still within the dream? In that fragile, fleeting moment, the real and the imagined coexist, and all possibilities seem alive. It is a rare and singular experience.”

Exhibition Details

Robertaebasta London, 85 Pimlico Road, SW1W 8PH, London Opening: 20th November 2025 | Closes: 15th January 2025 Opening Reception: 20th November 2025, 6–9 PM

For press inquiries, image requests, or to arrange an interview, please contact: Giorgia Zen – Gallery Manager – giorgia@robertaebastalondon.co.uk

About the Artist

Marco Sanges is an Italian award-winning photographer known for his distinctive surrealist vision and narrative-rich imagery. His work navigates the boundaries between dream and real- ity, frequently constructing cinematic tableaux that probe psychological depth and the uncanny. Sanges has created acclaimed series such as Wunderkamera, Circumstances, Polaroids, and Big Scenes, which have been exhibited globally and featured in multiple photobooks. He currently resides and works in London.

About the Gallery

Established in Milan in 1967, Robertaebasta is a globally recognised gallery celebrated for its expertise in twentieth-century art and design. The gallery remains dedicated to illuminating the connections between historical achievement and innovation, showcasing works that foster re- flection and dialogue across generations. Robertaebasta London, at 85 Pimlico Road, continues this legacy, providing a meticulously curated space where the richness of Italian mid-century art and design converses meaningfully with present-day creativity.

The Meadow signifies a gentle, liminal place of emergence; of rest and threshold, wildness and openness. It implies a context of entangled life, diverse intelligences and larger patterns.

(Billy Crosby)

The eponymous meadow can be understood then, as a literal setting as well as an inner or psychic terrain. Both ancient and modern, The Meadow operates on a suspended plane of speculative contemplation. Here we encounter the fruits of Crosby’s lived experience filtered through a recursive dialogue with generative AIs and LoRA diffusion models, trained on the artist’s previous work.

Motifs of biological mimicry and artificial emergence run throughout the work. Forms suggestive of mycelium, neural net structures and symbolic architectures flicker in and out of legibility…

(Billy Crosby)

The Meadow

By Shane Bradford and Siân Newlove-Drew

A head signifies cognisance, consciousness and first vitality; it’s the first part of the body to enter the world. Within the head is vital parts- the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the brain. This organ of nervous tissue is suspended in fluid, floating, ensheathed by multiple membranes. The external protective membrane is the dura matter, then in the middle is the transparent arachnoid membrane, named as such for its delicate spider web-like projections of protective tissue, cells and connections. The most interior layer of membrane around the brain is the pia matter, also termed the ‘tender mother’ membrane.

The ‘mother’ is an often-used metaphor for the world. Billy and I live next to a meadow, together, we often cross it. The meadow pushes us out- the opposite orient of home and returns us to it, moving through in different emotional states, imagining, and noticing, walking in glimpsed feeling.

During the summer’s heatwave, it caught fire. The meadows centre turned torrid, jet black and planetary, rolling into unharmed grass, distinctive, and changed against the green. It didn’t take long until plants asserted growth, in a stirring of rejuvenation. The blackened grass, rapidly flecked with new colour and shape. Standing inside it, I felt an exchange between Billy, myself, and the meadows atmosphere. We were spirited witnesses to the fire-the once buoyant embers and smoke, and the diligent roots, invisible underground-the manifest and the unseen felt. The meadow a resilient mother, a constellation, a nervous system of organised receivers, pollinators, processors, and responders.

‘Floaters’ are visual symptoms which appear in one’s vision. Emerging like snowflakes, thread-like objects, dots, rings, petals, insects, and amorphous clouds, or flashes. Floaters occur when strands and specks drift in the eyes vitreous humour and cause shadows. These shadows are perceived as suspended, appearing active and elusive, shifting across the visual field. In ancient Greek and Roman times, they were termed muscae volitantes, translating to “flying flies” and compared to lentils and swooping birds. Throughout history, humans have tried to understand these phantom specks, and have even interpreted them as supernatural and spiritual, and as optical messages from divine realms.

The idea that the eye could emit light was an enduring theory in early history. Empedocles compared the eye to a lantern; and therefore, vision the result of the eyes ‘light’ touching objects and grasping them with its beams. Ancient philosophers understood everything as made of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water; and that the eye, an incredible flaming beacon, was ignited by Aphrodite. To ancient people, this theory made sense. It was a reasonable explanation for the intense illuminated solar form that persists and reverberates when eyelids are closed, after looking into the sun, or the flashes and flares under skin, when eyelids are pressed with fingertips.

It also explained the occurrence of reflective optical orbs in the heads of wolves and lambs in the dark. We now understand this as ‘tapetum’, a mirror like layer beneath the retina, creating the eye-shine and night vision in animals. I can understand the thinking- and as a child, I liked the red discharging eyes that developed in the flash photos of me at birthday parties, and at Halloween. This red eye effect occurring in humans is caused by light

reflecting the blood in the back of the eye. This effect transformed me into a cat, hero, or mystic. The heads in Billy’s paintings, are perhaps fuzzy lambs with ablaze retinas… or cats or hero’s or mystics, or witnesses; us, interacting with the corporal world. Foregrounded, flashed, and focussed.

The reflective surface of the eyeball has stimulated gem-like descriptions. Comparable to the eye, it was thought that within a gemstone; compounded, absorbed, and intensified, was a light. Eye agate describes the distinctive formations of concentric rings, akin to iris and pupil, found within agate stone. Cats Eye Chrysoberyl, Bulls Eye, Hawks Eye and Tigers Eye are gemstones named after the eyes of animals.

Gemstones are used as talisman, for balance and for healing. They are connected to qualities, archetypes, and spirits. They are selected through connection to particular associations and externalise an innate and personal resonance. On holiday, Billy bought a purple piriform Amethyst. The stone containing stratums of white ocellus markings, and on the side less smooth, a love heart. I bought a carnelian, attracted to its redness and perfect sensual roundedness.

Today, passing through the meadow, I was stopped by a fallen leaf. It was glowing and crimson, and so glossy it was nearly viscous. Out from its midrib flared gold and orange. I photographed it to share with Billy. I typed, ‘fire leaf’ and pressed send.

BILLY CROSBY, b. 1992 Lives and works in London, UK

EDUCATION

2024 MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London
2016 BA (Hons) Painting, Camberwell College of Arts, London

SELECTED SOLO AND DUO EXHIBITIONS

2025 Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns, Lucas Gallery, London, UK 2024 Dreamers, Well Projects, NADA Miami (with Siân Newlove-Drew), US
2023 This Package Contains the Universe, Calcio, London (with Siân Newlove-Drew), UK 2022 TG Paintings, Ron Providence, Rhode Island, US

In Search of Our Most Precious Resource…, Well Projects, Margate (with Siân Newlove-Drew), UK 2020 Phlegm Festival, Honeymoon 226, London, UK

2019 Superorganism, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, UK 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025 Mechanical Animal, Blackbird Rook, Artsy Online (curated by Shane Bradford) 2024 Greta Thunder, Special Animal, London, UK (co-curated with Siân Newlove-Drew

The Fruit is Not There to be Eaten, Art Busan, KR (curated by Sunjoo Jung)
Caper, 10 Greatorex Street, London, UK (curated by Toby Rainbird)
Linked Out: Logged In, Gossamer Fog / Enclave Projects, London, UK (curated by Nina Wong) Palimpsestic Impressions, Arusha Gallery, London, UK (curated by Danny Leyland)

2023 Contingency Part 1 / Cozzie Livs Part II, Des Bains, London, UK (co-curated by Tom Bull)
Baggage Claim, Staffordshire St, London, UK (curated by Georgia Stephenson and Rosalind Wilson)

2022 High Windows, Recent Activity, Birmingham, UK (curated by Ted Targett)
2019 All or Nothing, Lungley Gallery, London, UK
2018 Fatal Attraction, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London , UK (curated by Chris Thompson)

Paper Cuts, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (curated by Kristian Day)

Salt Castles, Lewisham Arthouse, London, UK
2017 Changelings, The Flying Dutchman, London, UK (curated by Chris Thompson) 2016 Sticking the Moon with Double Sided Tape, Fotopub, SI(curated by Marta Barina)

PRIZES & RESIDENCIES

2018 The John Moores Painting Prize, Liverpool, UK
2017 The Vanguard Court Award, Artist Residency, London, UK
2016 The Marmite Prize, Block 336, London and Highlanes Gallery, IRL

PUBLICATIONS

2023 Seeking Channels Anthology, Well Projects, Margate

The Boys Are Alright: Feminist Interventions in Domestic and Public Space

Review of The Boys Are Alright – Solo Exhibition by Kim Dotty Hachmann

Curated and written by Natasha Marzliak

Motherhood and art share an intimate, often invisible dialogue: both demand presence, attention, and care, and both shape worlds. Yet a mother who is also an artist must navigate impossible demands, constantly pulled in multiple directions. In Kim Dotty Hachmann’s work, this tension becomes visible, showing how creativity and caregiving intertwine, collide, and produce unexpected forms of expression. Her practice navigates the delicate interplay between intimacy and public display, domesticity and artistic gesture. In her solo exhibition The Boys Are Alright, presented at Michaela Helfrich Gallery in Charlottenburg, Berlin (August 1–12, 2025), Hachmann presented over a decade of work at the intersection of art and motherhood — a space rich with ontological, ethical, and political inquiry. Her video and photographic series transcend mere depiction, positioning her children as active collaborators who shape rhythms, activate environments, and imbue the everyday with performative intensity. In Hachmann’s lens, the domestic sphere, the urban landscape of Berlin, and the quotidian are transformed into charged spaces where distinctions between maternal and political corporeality subtly dissolve, rendering the familiar simultaneously intimate, strange, and tinged with humor.

The family dynamic is brazenly foregrounded. Rather than sanitizing domestic scenes, Hachmann elevates the spontaneous and the unvarnished: the inherent disorder, the rhythms of daily life, the emotional complexities, and the delicate structures of care. Motherhood is not portrayed as a limitation but rather as a potent catalyst for creative endeavor. Furthermore, the work extends beyond a simple representation of parenthood or childhood, engaging with layered historical, social, and systemic concerns. Top Terrorist (2010) employs toy guns to deconstruct the ways in which violence and gender roles are subtly rehearsed in childhood play. The piece echoes Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (USA, 1903), particularly its iconic final scene where a bandit confronts the viewer. Unlike the early Western, which established a genre of cinematic masculinity, Hachmann recontextualizes children’s play as a stage where the boundaries between menace and innocence become fluid.

Concrete Speed (2011) juxtaposes a child’s body with the rigid forms of modernist architecture, highlighting the inherent tension between structured environments and the unpredictable spontaneity of youth. Resonating with this exploration, Rise & Fall (2011) depicts two nude children engaged in play on a bunk bed, yet strikingly adorned with oxygen masks. This visual paradox speaks to themes of vulnerability, control, and the pervasive influence of unseen forces. The scene, far from being tragic, possesses an uncanny playfulness: a scenario that feels both ordinary and subtly dystopian, humorous yet disquieting. This exemplifies Hachmann’s distinctive approach—the subtle estrangement of the commonplace, rendered with a precise, understated irony.

Hachmann’s later works further develop this logic of estrangement. Box (2012) illustrates children transforming confined spaces, specifically dog kennels, into arenas of movement and imaginative invention, thereby questioning the demarcation between restriction and freedom. This work, filmed outside a storefront, captures children repurposing cages into dynamic zones—climbing, entering, and transgressing perceived boundaries. It thoughtfully probes issues of parental oversight and the inherent, often untamed, vitality of children.

Beneath the surface of this nuanced engagement lies a trenchant critique. Burnout (2012) reframes maternal exhaustion not as a romanticized sacrifice but as a direct consequence of systemic overload. In a poignant counterpoint, Trashy Islands (2012) encapsulates fragments of cellphone footage within a miniature jewelry box—intimate moments of children rolling in sand, blowing bubbles, or gazing at a church ceiling. These fleeting, ephemeral gestures form a private reliquary of joy, offering a tender antidote to the theme of exhaustion.

Familienbande – Portrait Neo, Portrait Vito (2017) redefines traditional family portraiture by synthesizing European aristocratic iconography with tribal motifs, proposing a hybrid lineage that transcends biological ties or institutional definitions. The work stages kinship not as inheritance but as invention: a performative act that unsettles the authority of genealogy and the visual codes through which power, bloodlines, and legitimacy have historically been represented. By fusing the rhetoric of European sovereignty with visual vocabularies marked as “other,” Hachmann questions the hierarchies embedded in portraiture itself — a genre long tied to the consolidation of identity, property, and patriarchal continuity. In her images, family becomes less a matter of origin than of affective codes, improvised rituals, and shared fictions — a fragile but generative space where belonging is always in motion.

Walk Around (video, 2021) and Loading (photograph, 2022), presented as a unified installation and developed in Europe’s peripheral regions, position the child’s body as a conduit for imagination, navigating terrains situated between architectural constructs and organic landscapes. This pairing creates a visual play: in the video, water remains still, while in the photograph, the child’s body stands before a fountain where the water seems to erupt in an expression of freedom, highlighting a visual paradox.

Hachmann also engages with emerging technologies, pushing the boundaries of perception and temporality. lil bro (2024), an augmented photo-video installation featuring her youngest son exercising on a metal bar, integrates classical portraiture and chronophotography with augmented reality, creating a complex layering of moments, gestures, and rhythms. Time becomes malleable, folding past, present, and projected movement into a single experiential field, while the body registers perpetual negotiation — of gravity, space, and suspended duration. By merging analog and digital processes, Hachmann challenges the conventions of portraiture, foregrounding the flux of identity and embodiment, and exploring how emerging technologies can expand the vocabulary of the intimate, the performative, and the familial.

Hachmann wields humor as a critical instrument, fracturing mythologies of white motherhood and exposing the subtle choreography of normative gender expectations. In Me, My Boys and I (2025), she reinterprets her earlier piece Me, My Family and I (2006), casting herself as a contemporary Madonna—a domestic sovereign with vibrant pink hair, draped in a mantle evocative of Renaissance iconography. The subtle irony of this gesture subverts sacred archetypes of femininity and domestic virtue.

This exhibition marked a rite of passage. As her children — once inseparable from the fabric of her practice — begin to assert their own independence, Hachmann stepped across a threshold into a different artistic tempo. The crucible of early caregiving, with its relentless demands and accidental inspirations, gave way to another register: one less defined by immediacy. The Boys Are Alright was not an exhibition of closure, nor of simple recognition, but a provocation — a space where what lingers unsettles as much as it fascinates, where the everyday resists neat resolution, and where intimacy and strangeness coexist in uneasy, compelling proximity.

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Natasha Marzliak, Brazilian art critic, curator, and independent researcher based in Berlin, is Associate Editor of Art Style – Art & Culture International Magazine and a freelance professional specializing in contemporary art operations, digital art/NFT, video, and photography. With a PhD in Arts from UNICAMP and a doctoral residency at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris 1, her academic trajectory includes a postdoctoral position at Freie Universität Berlin, tenure as Tenure-track Professor at UFAM, and Adjunct Professorship at PUC-Campinas. Her work explores aesthetics, art history, and visual culture, with emphasis on postcolonial and decolonial studies, intersectional theory, and feminist and queer politics. Portfolio: https://natasha-marzliak.my.canva.site/

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Dancing in the Collapse of Constellations: Shiri Mordechay’s Unspoiled Nature 

By Natasha Marzliak

The paintings — for example, The Garden I Keep, Behind the Sun, I Can Fly in the Dark, Masked with Hunger, and Sunday Sisters, all from 2025 — impose themselves like open wounds in the field of representation, carnival apparitions that disrupt the illusion of stability we so desperately cling to. In them, the body is always more than human — it is beast, trauma, secretion, ancestry. Instead of clarity, there is fraying. Instead of purity, a crossroads. An affectionate carnage in a monstrous feast. The bodies painted by Shiri are not subjects but zones of passage, fields of friction between desire and violence, between spirituality and flesh. The “figures” appear as aberrant, hybrid multiplicities, vibrating between form and formlessness, as becomings that never settle. There are no identities here — only intensities.

A work that resonates deeply with this universe is The Garden of Earthly Delights, the baroque and apocalyptic triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1500–1510). Like Shiri, Bosch creates a cosmos where the body dissolves into a multiplicity of forms: humans merge with animals, monsters lurk among giant fruits, and nature becomes a living, threatening organism. It is a visual place where pleasure and dread coexist in unstable balance, where temptation turns into torture, and where the gaze gets lost amid details that never settle into a single narrative. The similarity lies in the ruin of forms, in the transgression of natural order, in a materiality that refuses to bend to modern rationality. Bosch, with his hybrid and deformed bodies, anticipates what Shiri updates and radicalizes: a painting of chaos. Both insist on disrupting the clear line of time, space, and identity, proposing affective constellations where past, present, and future overlap, and where bodies become a battlefield of forces in conflict.

The Garden of Earthly Delights and the My Unspoiled Nature series build a topology of excess: a pictorial field saturated with symbols and allusions where the human is reduced to flow — sexual, bestial, spiritual. Flesh is celebrated as a path of transcendence and fall. Flesh pulses beyond morality, in its potency of abyss and reinvention. The connection between Shiri and Bosch goes beyond the formal aspect of their murky, proliferating compositions. What also unites them is a disobedience to the architectures of order, replaced by a pictorial space where the image becomes a psychic, hallucinatory, almost oracular force. In My Unspoiled Nature, as in Bosch, there is no rest: each painting is a threshold, a passage between the erotic and the grotesque, the sublime and the amorphous. Their bodies are neither stable nor idealized — they are mutations, states of overflow.

Shiri and Bosch work with the idea of collapse as method: the collapse of form, linear narrative, and moralizing representation. While Bosch painted in an Europe marked by fear and religious control, Shiri does so in a hyper-exposed era where even the gaze has been captured by regimes of desire that shape subjectivity under neoliberal logic. Both offer a cosmology without a fixed center, where the human is just one of the forces inhabiting the scene. The grotesque here is not gratuitous excess but a politics of the flesh — a way to disrupt hierarchies of figures and meanings. In both, exuberance is also despair. The Garden of Earthly Delights, in its rapture, is the spectral ancestor of the contemporary ecstasy of My Unspoiled Nature.

Therefore, the intensity of Shiri’s images is not blind delirium. The paintings obscure and confuse — not as empty opacity, but as insurgent strategies against the instrumental rationalization of experience. It is not about representing a virgin or pure nature, but about straining the limits of the visible so that other natures (inner, spiritual, dissident) can emerge. What is at stake is not the theme of nature, but its radical indiscipline. The “unspoiled” in the exhibition’s title is ironic — referring to a nature that has not been softened to fit normative discourses. The artist resists allegorical clarity and claims the right to enigma. Thus, “unspoiled” refers to a space where the gesture can still remain untamed. It is in this interval — between the unconscious and the body, between daydream and the physical confrontation with paint — that the artist builds her ethics of the image.

Figures appear and disappear in a practice of ambiguity, of incompletion. Each canvas is a space of multiplicity and becomings — becoming-woman, becoming-landscape, becoming-spirit. These becomings are rooted in the experience of the body. The artist’s body, in contact with the material, is where the real collides with the sensible. She herself states: “oil forces me to be present, to be physical.” The gesture is political because it reaffirms the body as a field of presence, listening, and creation. Shiri — woman, Jewish, immigrant artist — operates at the heart of the North American art system with a language of her own, almost secret, that escapes hegemonic regimes of visibility. Her painting is a “line of flight,” full of strategies of survival and reconfiguration. In this light, the exhibition My Unspoiled Nature can be understood as a countercurrent to the performative cynicism of the institutional art circuit — especially in contexts like Los Angeles, where art often turns into spectacle or commodity.

Shiri subverts the speed of visual consumption. Instead, she offers images that demand time, revealing themselves gradually, like traces or apparitions. The act of painting then becomes a way to insist on another temporality — a counter-time to contemporary acceleration. The eruption of the pictorial unconscious — between strokes, remnants, and interruptions — is a refusal of reason as totality. Shiri does not paint schemas; she engages with affective, symbolic, and bodily constellations, where experience is closer to dreaming than waking. The resulting pictorial field contains lapses of the unconscious, moments of rupture against the pressure for clarity, transparency, and efficiency.

In a landscape saturated by overstimulating visualities, this exhibition offers not a contemplative pause, but a deliberate loss of consciousness — like one dancing at the edge of language, challenging the viewer to relinquish quick reading, immediate meaning. One can then inhabit these pictorial events in all their vibrant potency. The violent corporeality of the canvases — where viscous accumulations impose themselves over aqueous transparencies — demands a temporality of delayed apprehension. The images propel us toward a layered reading, without narrative stability. There is no key to interpretation, only an invitation to traverse the visual as a vital act. Like dancing with the unspeakable. Like a way of saying: here I am — between chaos and gesture — and there is beauty, even (or especially) when it refuses to be captured. They are phantasmagorias whispering behind the veil, blurring the gaze with a mist of unspoken meanings.

As Didi-Huberman said, the gaze that wishes to see must accept getting lost. The viewer is summoned to live within these images. In the face of ruin — of forms, times, subjects, certainties — all that remains is to dance. Dance with the garden. Dance with disorder. Dance with visceral constellations. And embody the unconscious. Surrender to these storm-images. To write this text, I had to silence the part of myself that still wanted to explain, to allow language to be contaminated by the images, to let analysis slide along with their reverie, recognizing madness as a method of thought. I am grateful for the vertigo delirium and inebriation Shiri serves so freely — a sensory banquet.

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Natasha Marzliak, Brazilian art critic, curator, and independent researcher based in Berlin, is Associate Editor of Art Style – Art & Culture International Magazine and a freelance professional specializing in contemporary art operations, digital art/NFT, video, and photography. With a PhD in Arts from UNICAMP and a doctoral residency at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris 1, her academic trajectory includes a postdoctoral position at Freie Universität Berlin, tenure as Tenure-track Professor at UFAM, and Adjunct Professorship at PUC-Campinas. Her work explores aesthetics, art history, and visual culture, with emphasis on postcolonial and decolonial studies, intersectional theory, and feminist and queer politics. Portfolio: https://natasha-marzliak.my.canva.site/

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

HackelBury presents A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty, a solo exhibition by American artists Doug & Mike Starn.

9 October 2025 – 28 February 2026

The twins present new works which reflect on impermanence, perception, and the tension between beauty and destruction. The two series on view, Under the Sky and Everything Is Liquid, explore the overwhelming yet often unnoticed forces – atmospheric, emotional, geological, and cultural – which shape our lives.

The Starns navigate the world with the conviction that interconnection and interdependence are not abstract ideas, but conditions of being. This presents an exigence for them in their work — responding to the constant flow of objects in time, and reflect the dynamic forces of nature. Skies drift and billow, oceans crash, mountains rise — each moving at a different pace, from the immediate and fleeting to the glacial and imperceptible. From this perspective of shifting landscapes, the work pulls us inward through their intricacies of surface and gestural mark-making.

Created using hand-coated papers, photographic fragments, adhesive, varnish, wax and pigment, the works resist classification. Photographs dissolve into paintings taking on the presence of sculptural objects. Their surfaces recall the carved and inked textures of Japanese woodcuts, particularly those rooted in Buddhist print traditions. These early prints were devotional objects made through repetition and touch, shaped by time and intention. The Starns draw on this spirit through their own layered process, where images are assembled, erased and remade — interrupting detail, smoothing tonal range, scraping away form, until what remains is an image which is felt as much as seen.

“starting with the clarity of high-definition photography, we break it down – zooming in, smoothing, revealing the texture of digital noise – until a simulacrum of perception is presented. Vision isn’t a camera. The image is made in your head.” – Doug & Mike Starn

In the Under the Sky series, the Starns create objects of something which we always see but cannot touch – a contemplative space to reflect on the harshness of our humanity.

“The cloud is the inevitable thought, the thing with no permanent shape, drifting through the clarity of blue and silent mind. As the cloud changes continually, the watcher only watches it until losing interest, and as awareness of it slips by, the thought’s gone out of sight. They always will be — old, worn, and always new.” – Doug & Mike Starn

Everything is Liquid also explores transformation, the idea that everything is fluid and constantly changing. What we perceive is not fixed, but shaped by memory, experience and attention. For the Starns, vision is not a passive act, rather an active process, taped together moment by moment, formed and reformed as we move through the world. As with the landscapes they depict, we too are fluid, evolving, incomplete.

The exhibition title, A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty, from the artists’ own writing reflects on the sky as a symbol of sublime indifference: ever-present, immeasurably beautiful, and entirely unmoved by human suffering. Yet, within this indifference, the works register an urgent emotional resonance – one which speaks to vulnerability and the fragile act of seeing.

“The Sky covers and continues at all times and in all places, covering us, over us. With its beauty, the horror we create on each other is made all the more horrific. It’s a tragedy of infinite beauty with no regard of our never-ending war waging and the oppression of each other. The Sky is completely, and utterly, oblivious.

But the beauty of the sky both shames and inspires. The situation is our own making, and the sky is ours… taking cover under its beauty, it’s beauty to strive for, try to live up to it, to see our reflection in it, recognize it.

It’s a beautiful day – be a friend to the weak and love justice. All the violence and suffering of humankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it” – Doug & Mike Starn

About Doug & Mike Starn

Doug and Mike Starn, American artists, identical twins, were born in 1961. They first received international attention at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, and for more than twenty years they were primarily known for working conceptually with photography. Their work has evolved through combining traditionally separate disciplines such as photography, sculpture, architecture – most notably their series Big Bambú. Major themes of their work include chaos, interconnection and interdependence.

At their mammoth laboratory studio in Beacon, New York, the former Tallix foundry, the Starns work in dialogue between their many concurrent series: most recently The No Mind Not Thinks No Things and other Buddhist explorations – the Absorption of Light concept, alleverythingthatisyou – their photomicrographs of snow crystals, and their re-exploration of the late 19th century colour carbon printing process. Through their carbon-prints, the Starns mingle gilding techniques to the painterly photo-process, and further advance their metaphorical lexicon on light with photographs of Buddhist statuary.

The Starns were represented by Leo Castelli from 1989 until his death in 1999. The Starns have received many honours including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1995; The International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography in 1992; and, artists in residency at NASA in the mid-nineties. They have received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Dagens Nyheter, Corriere della Sera, Le Figaro, The Times (London), Art in America, and Artforum, amongst many other notable media. Major artworks by the Starns are represented in public and private collections including: The Museum of Modern Art (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, (NYC); The Jewish Museum, (NYC); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC); Moderna Museet (Stockholm); The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne); Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); Yokohama Museum of Art (Japan); La Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris); La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

About HackelBury

HackelBury was founded twenty-six years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long-term.

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Iwagumi Air Scape Creates a Mountainous Ravine in The Middle of Melbourne

The Australian premiere of Iwagumi Air Scape by Melbourne art and technology studio ENESS has sprung up in Prahran Square in a monumental celebration of the beauty of wild spaces.

The word Iwagumi highlights the Japanese reverence towards beautiful rock formations found in nature. ENESS has adopted this principle to create Iwagumi Air Scape, a larger-than-life rock garden which transforms urban areas into a surreal landscape overnight.

By day, visitors can explore immense air-filled inflatables that appear to be thousands of tonnes of rock. As the sun sets, the artwork transforms with a vibrant display of colour and an interactive soundscape inspired by nature’s gentle inhabitants.

Iwagumi Air Scape is designed to be placed in the middle of a city, sharply contrasting features of the wilderness with the urban environment.

“Through this artwork we are celebrating how Japanese people acknowledge and recognise nature as the ultimate designer in terms of composition. Culturally, the Japanese admire and respect natural forms such as rock formations, observing these compositions in great detail, which they then translate into various artforms. This is evidenced by rock gardens in spiritual places, in civic spaces, in small domestic gardens and aquariums through aquascaping,” Artist and Founder of ENESS Nimrod Weis said.

In creating this ode to rock formations, Iwagumi Air Scape is patterned with intricate rock textures – from photographs of granite. This attention to detail achieves an additional optical feat, whereby the 16 air-filled inflatables are transformed into what appears to be real rock.

“There is a huge element of surprise in this work, when visitors touch the artworks and realise that in fact, they are inflatable,” Nimrod said.

As an additional sensory experience, crevices have been created throughout the intricate formation, creating opportunities to squeeze through the inflatable rocks along sections as long as 10 metres, as if traversing a real canyon.

The accompanying soundscape creates a highly textured environment including sounds of birds, night frogs, crickets, monkeys, bats and mountain streams. As the audience moves through the installation each rock triggers different sounds randomly adding to the overall auditory collage.

In further reinforcement about the expanse of cities and the effect that modern life has had on nature, deep within the formation, nearby street sounds penetrate the silence, posing the question about our relationship with wilderness in the modern world.

“Our creative practice interrogates the relationship between the virtual and physical worlds. In this case, we created digital rocks that are printed and illuminated but exist in space as convincing natural forms. The fact that these artificial objects can help in reconnecting people with nature says a lot about our world at this time,” Nimrod Weis said.

This work seeks to bring harmony, monumentality, and a sense of awe into an urban experience, reconnecting us with a fundamental resonance of nature and the earth.

Iwagumi Air Scape will continue to amaze visitors to Prahran Square until 17 August, after which it will continue its world tour – next stop, Spain. 

Nimrod Weis – Artist

Melbourne artist Nimrod Weis is a sculptor and technologist. Co-founder of ENESS: a multidisciplinary design studio founded in 1997, whose work explores the intersection between the virtual and the physical world to create a unique brand of interactive public art installations.

Nimrod is a passionate provocateur – constantly seeking to challenge the way we view cities and their spaces and share ways in which our shared experiences of technology and art bond us together. His work increasingly seeks to make art accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds.

Together with his team at ENESS he delves into the deeper potential of interactivity to form emotive responses from audiences through playful and accessible work that seduces viewers to get closer and experience unexpected curiosities, taking digital art installations out of the gallery and into the realm of public space.

STUDIO BIO

Founded in 1997, ENESS is a multi-award-winning art and technology studio. The multidisciplinary team explores the intersection between the virtual and the physical world in the creation of temporary and permanent interactive public art. Pioneers of new media art, ENESS artworks combine sculpture, textiles, design, furniture, software development, music and story.

Led by Artist and Founder Nimrod Weis, the team delves into the deeper potential of interactivity to form emotive responses from audiences and how to make art appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds. The studio’s style of work seduces viewers to get closer and experience unexpected curiosities, taking digital art installations out of the gallery and into the realm of public space. The team’s work questions how we view cities and their spaces and share ways in which technology and art bond us together.

ENESS believes in the power of providing art in everyday life that fires the imagination; that provides joy, happiness and beauty in unexpected places – transformational experiences that change lives. In this way the team are ‘happiness architects’, inspiring deeper moments between friends, family, and community.

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ENESS interactive installations are commissioned by urban and cultural precincts, festivals, galleries, and museums of modern art worldwide.

Landscape and Alchemy

July 17 – September 27, 2025

HackelBury Fine Art presents “Landscape and Alchemy,” showcasing the compelling works of Katja Liebmann and Nadezda Nikolova in a reflective dialogue on place, memory, and photographic transformation from July 17 to September 27, 2025.

Landscape and Alchemy brings together the evocative works of Katja Liebmann and Nadezda Nikolova in a contemplative dialogue between place, memory, and photographic transformation. Rooted in early photographic processes, Liebmann’s cyanotypes and Nikolova’s wet plate collodion images transcend straightforward landscape depiction to become meditations on time, perception, and the elemental.

Both artists act as modern-day alchemists, manipulating light, chemistry and material to transmute landscape into more than image,  into sensation, atmosphere, and emotion.

Here, the landscape becomes a site of transformation – both physical and poetic. Through processes that are as tactile as they are visual, Landscape and Alchemy reveals the photographic medium as a vessel for both material experimentation and spiritual inquiry. This is a journey through spaces not merely seen, but felt, remembered, and remade.

Liebmann draws on memory and archival photographic material to explore the mutable nature of time and recollection.  Her ”etchings of time” reflect her belief that memory is fluid and ever-changing. Her works often present fleeting glimpses of cityscapes and landscapes, imbued with a strong sense of presence – of the observer both witnessing and remembering.

“During our journeys through life, to our alleged goal, it is easy to become detached from our immediate environment. It becomes hard to see anything beyond what we have already learned to see and most of what we see, when we see, is quick and remote; we are lost in thought. I try to capture these traces of moments, of life happening around us, frozen in one image.” — Katja Liebmann

For Nikolova, nature is both subject and collaborator. Her work explores the tension between control and surrender, simplicity and complexity, light and shadow. Using elemental shapes in her photogram silhouettes, she embraces variables – temperature, humidity, exposure time – conditions that materially shape the final image. The resulting abstract landscapes are fragile, meditative, and timeless, capturing, in her words, “the still point of the turning world” (T.S. Eliot).

“I believe that we need to create new templates for how we relate to ourselves, to one another, to the living planet.” – Nadezda Nikolova 

“My work becomes a portal to place outside of space and time… the work aims to evoke mystery and awe, inviting contemplation and stillness, so that on some level, it speaks to beauty and hope.” – Nadezda Nikolova

Though distinct in method and mood, both artists are quiet observers of the world, engaged in existential explorations of identity and presence, guided by intuition. Nikolova’s interest in Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality—the capacity for new beginnings—echoes through her work, while Liebmann explores life as a cyclical journey with neither beginning nor end.

Their works resist literal transcription. Instead, they invite the viewer to feel, to experience. Nikolova’s abstract landscapes offer a spiritual refuge, while Liebmann’s remind us of the impermanence of our journey and the quiet beauty of the unseen.

About Katja Liebmann

Katja Liebmann (German b.1965) grew up in Berlin and is based in Oldenburg/Germany. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. In 2001 she received a Scholarship from the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenberg , Sweden. She was shortlisted for the 1998 Citibank Photography Prize (now the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize) and was awarded the prestigious DAAD scholarship in 1995. Recent exhibitions include: Blues at the Oldenburg State Museum, Germany, 2024. Her work was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025.

Katja Liebmann’s work is in the permanent collections of the Royal College of Art, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Charles Saatchi Collection, London; the LzO Art Collection, (Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg), Oldenburg; the Bishkek Art Centre, Kyrgyzstan; and the Omsk Museum of Visual Arts, among others.  Her work has been featured in Black + White Photography, Photomonitor and Artdoc magazine

She is a lecturer in printmaking and early photographic processes at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg and was Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London College of Printing and Camberwell College of Art, London, Kent Institute of Art & Design, Kent, UK and Haccetepe University, Ankara. 

About Nadezda Nikolova

Nadezda Nikolova (b. 1978, former Yugoslavia) is an artist presently working with wet plate collodion photograms—a historical technique dating back to the 1850s. Collodion—which uses a thick solution of nitrocellulose in ether or alcohol—is mixed with salts, and spread over a glass or metal plate, which the photographer sensitizes in a bath of silver nitrate before making exposures.

Nadezda Nikolova studied historic processes at the George Eastman Museum and at the University of Kentucky. Her art has been featured in solo exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, and her pieces are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles); Victoria & Albert Museum (London); Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art; Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California; and Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Publications from the Washington Post to Arab News to the Architectural Review have highlighted her work.

 In 2023, Nazraeli Press published her monograph entitled Elemental Forms, in collaboration with HackelBury Fine Art. She has lectured about her work at various universities and photographic institutions, including SUNY Plattsburgh (New York), Penumbra Foundation (New York), Center for Photographic Art (California), and Santa Fe Workshops (Arizona). She was a finalist for the 2018 LensCulture Exposure Awards.

FOR ALL PRESS ENQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT

Camilla Cañellas – Culturebeam | Cultural Communications

E: camilla@culturebeam.com M:+34 660375123

Phil Crook – HackelBury Fine Art
E: phil@hackelbury.co.uk T: +44 20 7937 8688 Instagram @hackelburyfineart