June 17 – August 21. Sofia Lomba: Bondage Bodies
Exhibition:
Sofia Lomba: Bondage Bodies
Thursday, June 17 – Saturday, August 21
Commencement: Thursday, June 17, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Covid notice: For June 17, RSVP here. For later dates, please register for a visit on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch
bondage
/ˈbɒndɪdʒ/
noun
- the state of being a slave
- sexual practice that involves the tying up or restraining of one partner
- when someone belongs to someone else
- when someone or something controls your life
- the state of being under the control of a force or influence or abstract power play
- the state of being under the control of another person play
Sofia Lomba’s Bondage Bodies installation is a body-based research anchored in gender, identity, body transformation and the domestic.
“There are not two sexes, but a multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, chromosomal, genital, sexual, and sensual configurations. There is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions” Paul B. Preciado “Testo Junkie”.
As a reaction to the violence witnessed in the world, early twentieth century modernist poet Yi Sang wrote “I believe that humans should be plants”, while Wohlleben (2016) considered the forest a social network similar to a human family in the way its trees communicate, share nutrients and support each other.
Luce Irigaray’s philosophical reflections on plant being as not self-centred, in an effort to deflect and rethink the anthropocentrism of western societies, also reverberate strongly with Yeong-hye’s (The Vegetarian by Han Kang) efforts to become a plant as a strategy to resist violence and patriarchal control.
Unfolding these thoughts, Sofia Lomba created a new series of drawings. Spongy bodies inside and outside of orifices. Bodies giving birth to themselves or others and having no clear differentiations between protuberances and invaginations. Bondage bodies, hugging bodies, bodies turning inside out.
Sofia Lomba (b.1984, Porto) lives in Berlin. Her artistic practice forms itself through drawing and performance. In a trance of repetition, she creates series of drawings around, inside and about body, producing images that are placed somewhere between flower studies and genitalia, between plants and flesh. Blurring autobiography and art, having her own body as the protagonist, she explores gender and identity issues, body transformations, pregnancy, sexuality and its representations.The way of presenting these artworks is always underlining the fragility of their subject matters. Further in their aesthetic, they would recall taxonomies of some kind. Her drawings have been shown at Bauhaus ReUse Berlin, General Public in Exile at Meinblau and TIER.space. She has been collaborating with Discoteca Flaming Star, performing live at District Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf, Ausland Berlin, Savvy Contemporary, Teatro del Barrio Madrid, Arthur Boskamp Foundation and in the film Ingrid (2003 – so far) presented in Friends with Books at Hamburger Bahnhof. Lomba has also collaborated with Graw Böckler for CTM Festival in Berghain and Wojciech Kosma as part of The Family at Galerie Kamm. She will be a fellow in residence in the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
