Photo Series, Digital Photographs, 6.720 × 4.480 px, 2021
In promising places, a body may take the shape of fancies, memories or fears. Two legs can carry endless desires. And on top, the horror of the banal. A good mime deserves another and a good form cannot resist the draw of a new shape. Today you run with the pack but tomorrow you may wake to find them gone, your body in an unfamiliar form.
Claudia Holzinger, Lilly Urbat and Janina Zais show what happens, when fickle form meets long lasting loyalty: A clash with identities, oddly specific. Body paint serves as a second skin that guides them as they bend into the shape of objects or the posture of animals.
Lilly Urbat als Dinosaurier, Juergen und Gerhard and Claudia Holzinger als der ICE, from the series Now we have the Salad, exhibition view Bei Langeweile öfter mal das Abc aufsagen, Galerie Krobath, Wien, AT, 2021
But how much of the outside, a real or imaginary environment, can a body carry? How much play is at hand, when all the forms you can take are already part of a ready-made cultural-consumerist dreamscape that sets the limits of imagination? Full of it, Zais, Holzinger and Urbat search for a corporeal connection to a vast iconographic field by turning the premise of studio-based photography around: rather than searching for the ideal image of a body, they are concerned with finding the body of an image.
„Now we have the Salad“ engages with the exuberance of mass cultural desire and celebrates it as hard coded identities, mingled together with a salty dressing. It shows that no matter how absurd, all bodies must bend under their identity, they can‘t do otherwise.
(Joannie Baumgärtner)
