pretty-pretty

In pretty-pretty, Kurdwin Ayub’s reflective self-staging meets Viennese Actionism, body horror coalesces with beauty and the pain that Ayub has so often staged, becomes physical for the first time. As she applies a fine needle making viewers’ nerves twitch, a bloody, radiant smile spreads across her face. (Diagonale 2020, die Unvollendete, Catalogue, mk)

Images of sublime beauty go hand-in-hand with their inverted doubles or undersides in this program – sometimes overtly, sometimes as a suggested shadow. In Viktoria Schmid’s A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE, images and sounds of a natural landscape in Lithuania are interwoven with a semi-transparent screen...