Bodyness at Schauwerk
The group exhibition Bodyness took place at Schauwerk Berlin as a three-month presentation bringing together four artists whose works all engage with the body—its visibility, its construction, and its shifting meanings.
Across different media, the exhibition explores how bodies are perceived, shaped, consumed, and controlled. It reflects on the body not as a stable form, but as something constantly negotiated between subject and object, presence and product. Bodyness becomes a space where physicality, image, and perception overlap—raising questions about identity, agency, and the politics of looking.
As one of the participating artists, I presented three works: “Am I an Object to You?”, “I Am an Object”, and the sculpture “Madonna.”
The print works investigate what happens when female bodies are engineered for consumption—digitally perfected, silenced, and stripped of agency. Through hyper-feminized, manipulated portraits, they explore the fragile boundary between subject and object, asking what remains of identity when the body becomes image. These figures do not age, do not speak, do not resist. The works question: what do we see when we look at a body—presence, or product? And who defines beauty, desirability, and visibility?
The sculpture “Madonna” expands this reflection into space. It engages with the tension between the archetypes of the “holy” and the “sexual,” addressing the Madonna–whore dichotomy and the ways women are often reduced to binary categories through the male gaze. The work proposes a reinterpretation of the Madonna figure as something more complex—holding contradiction rather than resolving it.
Together, the works presented in Bodyness reflect on the body as a site of projection, control, and resistance, questioning the systems that shape how it is seen and understood.