While the first part of the exhibition series, titled Like Billowing Clouds, focused on moments of allusion and disintegration, the second part reveals material opulence and carnal existence as common features of the selected works. They claim visibility and participation. They are present. This presence, however, is not accompanied by an urge for authenticity or even naivety. Rather, the works on view equally contain wisdom about the pain, the challenge and the mere impossibility to simply be there. This becomes evident in the many forms of masquerade that are expressed throughout the exhibition. It seems as if it is only through the camouflage that the meaning of these works can be made visible.

Hana Mileti?’s fabric works (Materials, 2020) at first look like small samples of woolly cloth, but the hand-woven pieces are based on photographs of urban environments, which the artist transfers into textile color fields. Hereby, however, she does not refer to the modernist concept of abstraction as autonomy, but to abstraction as a means of disguise and ambiguity. The yarn she uses is a bearer of the history of Croatia's textile industry. She obtains it from the last still actively producing yarn factory in her home country, alluding to the dissolution of state enterprises after the Yugoslavian war and the displacement of production to lower-wage countries. The small pieces of fabric thus become a protective cover of sorts, a camouflage of the history they carry.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s work Standing Straight, 2013, consists of two similar photographs of a little boy in school uniform. The boy doesn't smile. He actually looks disturbingly vacant. The only difference between the images lies in his posture. While he stands just straight on one photo, arms hanging down besides his body, on the other his left hand is on his hip and his legs are positioned in a classic contrapposto. The question occurs: which of these body postures is a pose? “I began to realize for the first time in a vague way that what people saw as a pose on my part was in reality just a convulsive effort to defend my true nature, and that what they saw as my true self was a masquerade,” describes the first-person narrator in Yukio Mishima’s 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask about his childhood in Japan in the 1930s. The queer boy found out very early that his own personality, his true self, can only rarely be revealed directly and that expressions, which are culturally considered inauthentic – an extravagant attitude, costumes, make-up or a perky pose – can carry just as much truthfulness within them.

But the struggles around visibility and authenticity can still penetrate deeper into the body. From clothes, make-up and body posture they reach to the skin and below. In her piece You are Gravity, 2018, Leda Bourgogne makes ends meet. She stretches latex and tulle panels, which she roughly sews together, on a stretcher frame and adds a selection of leather belts hanging through a hole in the black latex. Thereby she transfers the socially charged fabrics (latex=sex; tulle=tradition; belt=violence) into a distressed body. The stretcher, painted in a bloody red, becomes the skeleton whereas the fabrics become skin. This fragmented body appears as a battleground where socially grown fear, pressure and aggression meet.

The political dimension of physical presence is encountered in Maskirovka, 2017, in particular. The photography is part of a series of images by Tobias Zielony, produced during a long-term stay in Ukraine. A woman looks directly at the viewer. She is embedded in the dim light of Kiev by night. Traffic lights are reflected in the aluminum foil that covers almost her entire face. Only her eyes and the barely opened mouth are visible. It seems as if she is baring her teeth under her self-made mask. The title of the series refers to the Russian word for “masking”, which in turn refers to a military doctrine developed in the Soviet Union to confuse the enemy by means of camouflage, deception and denial. Since the Maidan uprisings in 2013, the term has also been used to refer to the Ukrainian war with Russia, which has never been officially declared. In Kiew, Zielony has immersed himself in the city's techno and queer scene, sensitively capturing its protagonist’s everyday life in the war zone and engaging in conversations about the todays brutal reality of being at present in today’s Ukraine.

Text: Pia-Marie Remmers