The three serial exhibitions, Like Billowing Clouds, Gurgle of the Brook and The Longing of the Spirit, display works from the collection of Casandra Hermann and recall different stages of personality development. Like Billowing Clouds encapsulates a state in which one oscillates between sensual perception and critical reflection, and Gurgle of the Brook  goes on to capture a cognitive moment that directly and physical confronts the structural struggles of the present. Finally, The Longing of the Spirit recognises the power of the processual and of one’s own transformative capacity, which ultimately culminates in the perpetual desiring of new experiences and discoveries.

An example of this is the work Towards Universal Pattern Recognition (Chips for Circuit Boards), 2020 by Jeremy Shaw. It is part of a series of black and white archive photographs that show people in a kind of spiritual, hedonistic state of intoxication. This is expressed here by way of the trance-like, childlike playfulness of the protagonist, as it appears via her own perception, and in the camera eye of her counterpart. Her psychedelic state of mind is distorted by the individual prism of the acrylic glass frame and thus ostentatiously intensified, making it seems like it will spill over onto the (supposedly) sober viewers.

In Luki von der Gracht's works, the search for one's own identity is both a permanent condition and a transformative process. In particular, representations of trans identities, which are usually underrepresented or stereotyped in commercial imagery, play an essential role. The mixture of erotic, emotional and political desire for visibility and diversity appears deliberately kitschy in the photographic works with their adolescent characters and their melancholic blurriness. The camera remains tied to the observer's perspective, poetically accompanying the protagonists as they search, question, discover and try out new things.

Jesse Darling's works, on the other hand, reflect a deep mistrust of conservative ways of thinking that try to maintain the status quo by leaving traditional structures untouched. Yet transformation and renewal can only become a reality where bodies, organisations and civilisations break down.[1] Darling's sculpture Sphinxes of the gate (Wounded sentry), Sphinxes of the gate (Pet sentry), 2018 shows the head of a sphinx, a hybrid of human and lion, with a bright pink ball gag in its mouth. Made from everyday trash and industrial scraps, it is a reference to the legend of St Jerome, one of the most important scholars of Christianty, whose iconographic attributes include a lion. Presented in a display case, the sculpture, made of rubbish, questions the authority of academies, museums and the church itself. At the same time, it aims to defy the claim to absoluteness issued by St. Jerome's translation of the Bible, which, up until today, continues to shape gender-specific role distributions in church and society. With the decomposition of the figure of the lion into a few fragmentary individual parts, gagged and bent, the progressive energy that makes personal (and social) transformation possible in the first place emerges. 

Text: Pia-Marie Remmers

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[1] Jesse Darling, in conversation with Isabella Zamboni for Mousse, 2019.