Galleries

Paintings by Sabrina Shah on surfaces by Shane Bradford

Trespass is an unusual collaboration between Union curator Shane Bradford and painter Sabrina Shah. The project is intended to test the jurisdiction of creative authorship in a traditional gallery setting. While these works are firmly Shah’s painting, the fact that they have been painted on top of abandoned former works by Bradford defines the series. Doubts arise. Questions are posed: what does it mean to trespass? Where is the consent?

To all these queries there is only one reliable response: the exhibition itself. A complex curatorial conundrum has been initiated, the outcome of which is visible in the actual event of the exhibition experience. If there are answers, they reside within the dynamism of Shah’s brushstrokes and the inherent surprise of the unpremeditated symbiosis between the protagonists.

Shah’s spontaneous, unfiltered, and immediate paint-handling is supported by the show’s context, allowing for the event to remain in progress. The imagery often depicts participatory social happenings to which the viewer is invited. The result is a gloriously jarring and unexpected extension of Shah’s painterly psycho-dramatic fiction.

Shah has a history of reworking her older paintings. The previous layers and scars are important. This time, however, her imagery responds to the incomplete narrative threads of Bradford’s beginnings’. Suggestive traces of basketball courts, road traffic barriers, and abandoned train tracks are picked-up on and answered with animals, characters, toys, and games. 1,2,3. First, second, and third. Is anybody winning?

While Bradford’s backgrounds perform the dual role of story and substrate to provide an authentic foundation for Shah’s primary interventions, an intimate yet delightfully unstable bond is formed. Despite the literal cover-up there is no hiding; the uncertain friction between object and ground makes for an atmosphere of palpable vitality. There’s a raw honesty in the dynamic fusion of the paintings that perfectly platforms Shah’s naturally expressive and distinctive idiosyncrasies.

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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).

Art as a Bridge Between Cultures.
OmenaArt Foundation and LuginsLand of Art’s Thematic Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026

The OmenaArt Foundation and LuginsLand of Art will once again be situated at the intersection of cultures and contemporary artistic practices. In 2026, the Foundation returns to the Malta Biennale, with a thematic pavilion titled Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives.

Curated by Natalia Bradbury, the exhibition will feature large-scale textile installations by Marta Nadolle, Eliza Proszczuk, and Ernestina Mansa Doku, created during their artistic residency in Malta. The artists, coming to Malta from Poland and Ghana, will intertwine the historical narratives of both countries, drawing on weaving traditions and the island’s local heritage. Their collaboration began during Accra Cultural Week 2025 in Ghana, where, together with local artists Moses Adjei, Cornelius Annor, and Raphael Adjetey Adjei Mayne, they conducted art workshops for children exploring the textile art heritage of Poland and Ghana. The workshops took place at Kids Haven School, built by the Omenaa Foundation.

“Our exhibition explores the theme of historical bonds and solidarity between Poland and Ghana. Through the artists’ works, we want to show that despite distance and differing experiences, we are united by shared emotions and values,” says Natalia Bradbury, curator of Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives. “Ernestina Mansa Doku brings to the project an organic approach to material and nature; Eliza Proszczuk contributes a reflection on memory, emancipation, and the body; while Marta Nadolle offers a perspective focused on interpersonal relationships and observations of tensions between the public and the private. The juxtaposition of these three practices makes it possible to create works that operate both through personal narrative and through the universal language of contemporary art, legible within the international art circuit,” Bradbury emphasizes.

Running from 11 March to 29 May 2026, the OmenaArt Foundation’s thematic pavilion will reference the philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – emphasizing interdependence, community, and mutual respect. This idea links the artists’ collaboration with historical Polish-Ghanaian relations that have developed since the 1960s. The artworks will be accompanied by a premiere sound installation by the composer Mariusz Szypura. The pavilion will also feature a public program including debates, panel discussions, and meetings with international experts.

The thematic pavilion is organized by the OmenaArt Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering relationships and promoting artists from Central Europe and West Africa. In 2025, the Foundation presented its African art collection for the first time at the TOP CHARITY Art exhibition at the Orangery of the Wilanów Palace. Also, OAF supported the creation of a monumental work by Ibrahim Mahama, which was exhibited at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. The OmenaArt Foundation works closely with Phenomenaa Gallery in Warsaw, consistently strengthening the presence of African and non-European artists on the Polish art market.

“In recent years, African art has secured a significant position on the global art scene. Works by artists such as Amoako Boafo and Julie Mehretu achieve record-breaking prices at auctions and are presented in leading cultural institutions. In 2025, ArtReview magazine named the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama the most influential figure in contemporary art. That is why I am proud that through the activities of my Foundations, we support artists from this continent – investing in art and education, including through the construction of the innovative Kids Haven Sport & Art Complex in Ghana, and promoting their work on international platforms,” says Omenaa Mensah, CEO of the OmenaArt Foundation.

“I am especially delighted that our exhibition, presented during the Malta Biennale 2026, will highlight how powerful and inspiring intercultural dialogue can be – between Poland and Ghana, Europe and Africa – in the extraordinary setting of a Mediterranean island,” Mensah adds.

The exhibition will explore intercultural relationships across past, present, and future perspectives, while simultaneously interpreting the central theme of Malta Biennale 2026 – CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT – which refers to ideas of repair, connection, and purification.

The OmenaArt Foundation and Luginsland of Art project highlights the significance of the Polish and Ghanaian contemporary art scene. Through its presence at the Malta Biennale – an important global artistic platform – it strengthens intercultural dialogue and promotes the rich textile traditions of Poland and Ghana.

Artists

Ernestina Mansa Doku

Ernestina Mansa Doku (b. 2001) is a Ghanaian visual artist of the younger generation who lives and works in Accra. She works primarily with acrylic paint, as well as artistic textiles, animation, and sculpture. She completed her BA in Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where she is currently continuing her MA studies in the same department. She is a member of the blaxTARLINES collective. In 2024, she received a scholarship from the OmenaArt Foundation as part of the Artis Arundo programme, which supports emerging talents.

The artist draws inspiration from nature and how it adapts to changing conditions and environments: pushing through cracks, clinging to surfaces, and intertwining with other objects. In her practice, she seeks to challenge anthropocentric perceptions of lived experience, opening space for a posthumanist perspective. She describes her creative processes as a form of surgical intervention; through deformation, reorganisation, transformation, multiplication, or division of forms, she strives to create something new. In the act of creating, Doku consciously embraces spontaneity and the role of chance. Her painting reflects horror vacui (Latin: fear of emptiness) – the artist deliberately saturates space with details and elements that often go unnoticed in everyday life.

Marta Nadolle

Marta Nadolle (b. 1989) is a Polish visual artist specializing in painting. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, receiving her diploma with distinction in 2014. In her artistic practice, she addresses themes of love, alienation, coming of age, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships. She reworks the tradition of the veduta, intertwining it with inspirations drawn from folk culture. By setting together these seemingly disparate elements and customs, she crosses the line between what is central and what is peripheral, between the public and private. Her works combine metropolitan narratives with intimate handcraft and folklore, exploring the emotional landscapes of the metropolis. From Nadolle’s paintings emerge the desires of contemporary city dwellers – for genuine closeness and some emotional calm.

Winner of Paszporty Polityki Prize 2023 in the field of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited both in Poland and internationally, including in Warsaw, Łódź, Sopot, Wrocław, Poznań, Prague, Bratislava, Stockholm, and at NADA Art Fair in Miami (2021). She has held several solo exhibitions, including Don’t Worry (LETO, Warsaw, 2022), I’ll Send Him Nudes (Galeria Dobro, Olsztyn, 2021), and 35 (Galeria Art Hub, Łódź, 2024). Nadolle’s works are held in the collections of the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Museum of Warsaw, and the mBank collection.

Eliza Proszcuk

Eliza Proszczuk (b. 1980) is a Polish visual artist, PhD in Fine Arts, academic lecturer, and researcher. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Painting, 2006) and from the AKV St. Joost in Breda and Den Bosch (Netherlands), where she earned an international Master of Fine Arts degree (2009). She creates textiles, spatial objects, and collages, treating art as a tool for social change and a space of emancipation. In her practice, she explores themes of memory, inheritance, and women’s herstory, combining artistic activity with research and social engagement.

She has carried out projects with marginalized groups, including incarcerated women, patients of addiction treatment centers, and refugees. She is the author of, among others, the project Girls from the Castle, created in collaboration with female inmates of the Warsaw-Grochów Detention Centre (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2014; CSW Kronika, 2022), which examined childhood as a cell and culture as a prison.

She draws inspiration from the traditions of northeastern Poland, where she comes from, reconstructing and reinterpreting women’s crafts and narratives erased from official history. She collaborates with international academic and artistic institutions, including the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2022, she received a four-year COST grant (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) for a research-artistic project on sisterhood and social justice. Proszczuk is a co- editor of the publication Traces of Sisterhood (Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Press) and a co-organizer of events combining art and science, such as Care and Repair: Ungendering Memory and Museum Practices (Ethnographic Museum, Ljubljana, 2023) and Connecting Lines: Tracing Care at the Intersection of Feminism and Ecology (City of Women, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 2024). Since 2017, she has been working at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she leads the Textile in Architecture Studio. She is a two-time recipient of scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and ZAiKS. She finds inspiration in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Culture as prison, art as liberation” – and consistently creates spaces where art becomes a tool for experimentation, therapy, and social transformation.

Mariusz Szypura – Sound Installation

Mariusz Szypura (b. 1972) is a composer, music producer, and audiovisual artist working at the intersection of music, design, and contemporary art. After years of activity on the Polish alternative scene (Happy Pills, Blimp, Silver Rocket), he focused on interdisciplinary artistic projects in which sound becomes a sculptural material and a tool for shaping experience.

In recent years, he has concentrated on large-scale audiovisual installations. In 2024, at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, he presented the project in:human – an immersive environment exploring relationships between humans and technology through multichannel sound and image. During the Unsound Festival at Lincoln Center in New York, he presented êkhos, combining electroacoustic composition with stereoscopic projections.

His most extensive artistic undertaking is Chopin Residue – an international audiovisual project deconstructing the work of Frédéric Chopin through experimental compositional techniques combined with large-scale imagery, video installation, and spatial sound. In its musical layer, co-created with artists such as Adrian Utley, Lee Ranaldo, John Stanier, and Fennesz, it has been presented in venues including New York and Osaka. As a composer of music for exhibitions, Szypura creates autonomous sonic environments that engage in dialogue with both the artwork and the architecture. His compositions do not illustrate – they shape the rhythm of perception, the intensity of experience, and the viewer’s relationship with space.

Curator – Natalia Bradbury

Natalia Bradbury is an art historian, curator, and art advisor, living and working between Poland and the United Kingdom. She is the Executive Director of OmenaArt Foundation and Phenomenaa Gallery in Warsaw, which specializes in contemporary African and non-European art.

Her main area of research focuses on the growing significance and market value of a new generation of artists from West Africa and its diaspora, as well as from Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. In her work, she analyzes the factors influencing the development of this segment, including relationships between global institutions, galleries, collectors, and auction houses. She initiates projects that situate contemporary artistic practices of Polish and African artists within a broader economic, social, and geopolitical context.

She is the author of exhibitions such as TOP CHARITY Art (2024, 2025), Other Geographies, Other Stories (Malta Biennale 2024, with Hanna Wróblewska), and Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives (Malta Biennale 2026), co-curator of the Kids Haven Sport & Art Complex in Ghana. Mentor at Rafał Brzoska Foundation, she also serves as a juror for artistic competitions, including the 16th edition of Best Artistic Diplomas, organized by the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and Loostro – Competition for Young Artists.

Organisers – OmenaArt Foundation & Luginsland of Art

About OmenaArt Foundation

OmenaArt Foundation implements unconventional artistic projects in Poland and internationally. The Foundation’s mission is to build intercultural dialogue, support artists, and promote contemporary art from Eastern Europe and Africa, with a particular focus on art in public spaces. OAF is also actively involved in the revitalization of historic buildings and in conservation and educational projects.

The Foundation coordinates the TOP CHARITY Auction – one of the most significant philanthropic events in Europe. Over the course of four years, the auction’s organizers have raised more than PLN 145 million. The funds have been allocated to the charitable work of the Omenaa Foundation, the Rafał Brzoska Foundation, and the Philanthropic Consortium, as well as to OmenaArt Foundation projects supporting artists and cultural institutions.

About Luginsland of Art

LuginsLand of Art organizes artist residencies, exhibitions, and public programmes in Malta. The project aims to breathe new life into one of the island’s most important architectural gems – Villa Luginsland in Rabat. The historic property, currently undergoing restoration, will be transformed into a center for exhibitions, discussions, and artistic events, fostering international artistic exchange and open dialogue about the past, present, and future.

Malta Biennale

Malta Biennale is an international contemporary art initiative inaugurated in 2024 under the patronage of UNESCO and the President of the Republic of Malta. The biennale’s concept centers on dialogue between contemporary art and cultural heritage – exhibitions are presented in historic sites, including Valletta, the Three Cities (Birgu, Cospicua, Senglea), and the Cittadella in Gozo.

The inaugural edition featured over 100 artists from 35 countries, as well as 14 national and thematic pavilions across 21 historic venues. The first participating countries included Poland, France, Germany, China, Austria, Serbia, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, and Malta.

This year’s Malta Biennale will take place from 11 March to 29 May under the theme CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT. The event’s Artistic Director is Rosa Martínez, a renowned curator and Artistic Director of the 51st Venice Biennale. She has also directed or curated biennials in Barcelona (1988–1992), Rotterdam (1996), Istanbul (1997), Santa Fe, New Mexico (1999), Busan (2000), São Paulo (2006), and Moscow (2005–2007).

Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives

Thematic Pavilion of the OmenaArt Foundation, Malta Biennale 2026 (11 March – 29 May 2026)

Venue: Old Armoury of the Knights of Malta, Birgu, Malta Artists: Ernestina Mansa Doku, Marta Nadolle, Eliza Proszczuk Curator: Natalia Bradbury

Organisers: OmenaArt Foundation, LuginsLand of Art

Partners: Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Valletta, Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Phenomenaa Gallery, Apart, Luce&Light, LOT Polish Airlines

To Pulse, One Must Love: On Kim Dotty Hachmann’s Pulsar

Essay by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style International Magazine

About the artwork »Pulsar« (2008–2024) by Kim Dotty Hachmann, video installation, 120 x 120 cm, white plaster cast from silicone mold, AI-generated video projection, sound; on view at Ausstellung „Aus heiterem Himmel“, November 1–23, 2025, Verein Berliner Künstler in cooperation with the A und A Kulturstiftung, part of the selection of artists nominated for the Kunstpreis für Bildende Kunst 2025.

»Pulsar« (2008–2024) by Kim Dotty Hachmann is a liminal artwork, situated in a threshold space: it invites the viewer to the impossible experience of seeing birth through the eyes of the one being born. This perceptual shift, created through the sculptural womb receiving a video projection generated by artificial intelligence, does more than represent birth; it invites the viewer to inhabit this state of coming into being in a way that is both intimate and disorienting. What is normally assumed as a self-evident beginning – the arrival into the world – is rendered strange, making the body, time, and relational conditions visible as active, contested dimensions.

The choice of the title, Pulsar, emerges naturally from this experience of threshold and passage. Coming from Latin-based languages – Portuguese and Spanish – the word carries the sense of pulsing, a rhythmic insistence that is felt physically and intuitively. Its pronunciation and cadence resonate with the ongoing, insistent force of life, preparing the viewer for the embodied experience of the installation that follows.

The white plaster womb, cast from a silicone model, functions simultaneously as membrane and surface. In this three-dimensional object, the video projection is not merely an overlay of image but a spatial inscription that transforms the volume into a body in flux, where presence, observation, and corporeality intersect. This practice, highly relevant in contemporary art, sits at the frontier of video-mapping and object-based installation: by projecting onto the womb, Hachmann creates a hybrid materiality in which digital imagery interacts with physical form, making the act of seeing inseparable from the act of being present. The body pulses alongside the viewer who experiences it in that moment, not as record or memory, but as a shared, in-the-moment event. In dialogue with the exhibition’s title, Aus heiterem Himmel, birth appears as something that comes unexpectedly – from nothing, yet also carrying the weight of a larger cosmology.

The sound layer is structuring for the work. Ancestral female chants are delivered through headphones, creating a focused listening space. This sound recalls practices that Western history medicalized, silenced, or disciplined, restoring birth to a ritual, communal, and cosmological dimension. Hachmann describes this experience as a “trance of self-empowerment,” repositioning maternity beyond idealization or stigmatization and making visible the agency of the female body. The artist’s declaration that “my female body is a gift” situates the work within a lineage of feminist practices that reclaim the maternal body from historical regimes of control and appropriation. In this sense, Hachmann’s gesture resonates with Mary Kelly’s pioneering works of the 1970s: in Anteparto (1973), Kelly transformed intimate traces of pregnancy into analytical records, and in Post-Partum Document(1973–79), she displaced the mother’s body from an object of representation to a site of enunciation, exposing how authority, authorship, and visibility are structured within patriarchal culture.

The artificial intelligence^[1] does not function as a neutral technical device; it acts as a proposer of ethical and existential questions. The imagery it generates occupies an in-between space: it is neither memory, nor representation, nor pure fiction. It attempts to imagine what cannot be remembered – the intrauterine space, the act of coming into the world – and in doing so, raises questions about how technology engages with the body, life, and the limits between human and nonhuman.

The title of this essay, »It Takes Love to Be Able to Pulse«, summarizes the ethical dimension the work evokes. The pulse is not only a heartbeat, but a cosmic vibration; a condition of shared existence, dependent on care, connection, and presence. Love here is not sentimentality, but a political, relational, and cosmogonic force. It is what sustains life and the very possibility of entering the world.

»Pulsar« returns us to the moment before consciousness, before language, before the world as we see it. At its core is the understanding that birth is not simply past, but a continual condition: we are always being launched into the world, always crossing membranes, always pulsating. The work opens a space onto this impossible moment, the impossibility of now, and in doing so, allows the viewer to recognize themselves as a body that vibrates, that is traversed, that inhabits this state of coming into being. Hachmann offers this passage as a form of reunion: with beginnings, with the body, with ancestry, and with the cosmos. In the end t reminds us that the pulse of life does not exist alone. To Pulse, One Must Love.

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^[1] The work was first presented in Next Level Sht* (2024) at INSELGALERIE Berlin, curated by the artist and Miriam Smidt, an annual exhibition dedicated to artistic practices engaging with artificial intelligence.

INSELGALERIE Berlin
Petersburger Street. 76 A, 10249 Berlin
www.inselgalerie-berlin.de

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).

Next Level Sh*t: Digital Works in a (Still) Analog World, curated by Kim Kim Dotty Hachmann and Miriam Smidt, INSELGALERIE in Berlin

Exhibition: Next Level Sh*t | INSELGALERIE, Berlin | until 24 January 2026

Essay by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style International Magazine

In Next Level Sh*t – digital works in an analog world, curated by Kim Dotty Hachmann and Miriam Smidt, INSELGALERIE in Berlin unfolds as a continuous site of tension between the physical and the virtual, the artisanal and the algorithmic, the human gesture and technological mediation. The addition of (still) to the subtitle, (a still analog world), does not belong to the exhibition’s official title, but serves, in this essay, as a critical inflection that I propose, a deliberate gesture to name a liminal moment, in which we live, a suspended, unstable temporality where the analog persists not as nostalgic residue but as an active field of contestation.

We inhabit a world increasingly saturated with synthetic images, AI-generated visualities, and regimes of hyperproduction that progressively hollow out the gaze. In this context, the question quietly underpinning the exhibition is not how to reject the digital, but how to continue producing meaning, experience, and relationality in an ever more fictive world, without losing sight of the fact that our relationships, affects, and corporealities remain profoundly “analog”. It is precisely within this interstice that the exhibition operates.

The curatorial structure resists a linear narrative of progression from analog to digital, favouring an experience composed of infiltrations, returns, echoes, and mirrorings, an expanded present in which matter and code no longer separate cleanly, and where the vision is constantly mediated by interfaces, platforms, and automated systems.

This logic manifests immediately upon entry, a print of an eye generated by artificial intelligence by Miriam Smidt greets the visitor, a static eye observing from the outset, functioning not as scenography but as a conceptual device, a non-human perception that precedes and frames the visitor’s experience. At the far right of the gallery, in the bar, a space of conviviality, distraction, and inebriation of Bacchus, the same eye returns in motion as an AI-generated video. Between print and video, between still and moving image, a silent circuit emerges that structures the entire exhibition, a continuous oscillation between presence and simulation, between what remains materially anchored and what flows, permeated by artificial intelligence.

The decision to begin the exhibition route on the right-hand side of the gallery, a deliberate choice of mine, reinforces this ambiguity. While this section hosts predominantly physical works, collages, paintings, prints, and objects, it does not constitute a sanctuary from the digital. The view has already been shaped at entry. The digital does not appear as a destination, but as a latent layer permeating the space, even where paper, paint, and matter remain tangible.

Within this liminal zone, Miriam Smidt’s works operate as a recurring conceptual axis. In Me, Myself, AI (2024), her images function as indices of subjectivity in constant modulation. Life, death, healing, and transformation do not emerge as opposites, but as transitional, fluid conditions.

This exploration materialises three-dimensionally in the series Update Us (2025), realised in 3D printing. Glandula Empathiae, Memoria Triplex, and Glandula Dissolutrix designate fictional organs, as if the human body needed to be redesigned to survive a world saturated with informational flows. The AI eye accompanying the visitor from entry to exit functions as an amplified metaphor, an organ without a fixed body, observing, learning, and returning images.

Also on the right-hand side, Swaantje Güntzel’s works offer a rigorous critique of contemporary landscape imagery. In Eisbär / Diamond Painting II and the installation Arctic Illusion (2025), popular artisanal techniques interrogate the aestheticisation of environmental catastrophe and the reproduction of stereotypical visions of the Arctic, now amplified through databases and AI-generated imagery. Dialogue with a chatbot in Arctic Illusion exposes the gulf between material urgency and discursive simulation, often more readily consumed than translated into transformative action.

Maja Rohwetter’s collages and paintings establish a poetics of fragmentation. In Paradise #1 and Paradise #2 (2024), as well as in Gemischte Gefühle #19 (2025), paradise appears as a precarious construction, composed of cut-outs, overlays, and ambiguous affective registers. The logic of collage dialogues directly with the aesthetics of digital interfaces, feeds, windows, and layers, while manual execution asserts the corporeal presence of the artist. In In the Vicinity of Life Parts (2011), painting extends beyond the canvas, entering processes of virtualisation that destabilise the analog rather than negating it, transforming the medium itself into a field of ontological inquiry.

Moving toward the left-hand side, the exhibition brings into view what until then had operated as a subterranean layer, the digital emerging as a space in its own right, experienced through the curators’ careful scrutiny. Here, NFTs from Kika Nicolela’s collection assume a central role. Navigation through this territory remains cautious, and rightly so. The infrastructures underpinning the crypto universe are neither neutral nor free from environmental, economic, or political contradictions. Yet within this context, NFTs do not present themselves as redemptive nor as absolute villains. They emerge as symptoms of our times, spectral spaces in which images, affects, and experiences exist without stable physical anchoring.

In A Working Day (2025), Estelle Flores offers a quiet observation of labour time within the digital economy. An ordinary day is transformed into an aesthetic unit, a datum, a record. The work neither accuses nor celebrates, but observes. As an NFT, the piece amplifies this ambiguity: lived time is captured, edited, and circulated. What precisely is being archived here, a day of work, or the experience of existing under continuous regimes of productivity?

In the feels – seventeen aka. stepping through the warp that I can only see (2025), the artist littlecakes constructs a brief yet intensely sensory video. The work operates as a fragmented affective experience, marked by unstable rhythms and discontinuous perceptions. The “warp” of the title is not merely visual or temporal, but psychic, an internal displacement, difficult to articulate, referring to emotional states mediated through the digital. The piece inhabits a space between presence and disappearance, like a ghost that manifests only as flow.

At the conceptual core of the exhibition, Ann Schomburg makes explicit what quietly permeates the entire path, infrastructures of intimacy. In CATThexis (2025), a complex and striking installation, visitors encounter a series of hybrid devices, physical works, a telephone through which they can “speak” to a cat, mirrors, digital interfaces, and a website narrating a futuristic story about human-animal relations. The narrative recalls elements from the film Minority Report (2002), in which technology monitors every gesture and glance. Visitors care for the animal, yet by failing to follow certain rules or protocols imposed by the digital control structure, they lose it. This tension between care, responsibility, and technological surveillance generates an immersive experience blending affection, frustration, and surprise, revealing how algorithms, digital systems, and attention economies shape relationships, desires, and visibility. Life, performance, and social practice intertwine, highlighting the active role of the visitor within the sensitive ecosystem the work constructs.

It is within this entanglement of works, languages, and media that (still), as a critical gesture, manifests its force. It does not signal nostalgia nor a refusal of the digital. It designates a heterogeneous transitional state. We are increasingly immersed in synthetic images and systems shaping perception, memory, and desire, while simultaneously relying on bodies, materials, and physical relations. The (still) marks this unstable interval, a time in which passage remains incomplete, with consequences still unresolved.

The question underpinning Level Sh*t is not new. It has arisen with the advent of photography, cinema, and video, and resurfaces now with symbolic artificial intelligence, NFTs, and digital environments: where is art headed? Perhaps the answer lies precisely in its capacity to endure. Art does not die. It appropriates, displaces, distorts, and reconfigures available media to render visible that which remains as yet unnamed.

The AI eye greeting visitors at the entrance, returning in motion at the end of the route, offers no answers. It returns the question to the visitor. Perhaps the exhibition’s subtitle, digital works in an analog world, speaks precisely to this, not a delay but a critical interval, a time necessary to think, feel, and conceptualise the observing before the analog becomes mere archive or fetish. This will not occur, as everything intertwines in the loose threads of contemporary art. Level Sh*t reminds us that we are midway along the path, and in the meantime, the responsibility to look and to think the gaze persists. It is incumbent upon us, artists, curators, critics, and audiences, to sustain this reflection.

INSELGALERIE Berlin
Petersburger Street. 76 A, 10249 Berlin
www.inselgalerie-berlin.de

Opening hours: Tue–Fri 2-7pm, Sat 1-5pm
Finissage of the show with artist talk: Sat 24th January 2-4pm

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).

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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