In her most intensive solo exhibition up to now, “Dolorem Ipsum,” Georgian artist Anna Ok.E. explores the choreographed physique and human states characterised by instability, alienation, and transformation inside architectural landscapes. Together with her presentation, Ok.E. questions the notion and conception of flows of motion in area, humorously analyzing architectural steering techniques, constructions, and boundaries, in addition to their imagined facades, thus breaking with social norms within the development and efficiency of recent paths. On the coronary heart of her inventive observe is the continual exploration of the human physique, with a give attention to ballet, post-communist situations, and motion in fashionable structure amid traditionally important design parts. She investigates private and collective bodily experiences of time, choreography, and ache, linking them in spectacular installations to the bodily and digital self. Skilled as a classical ballet dancer, she displays on human motion within the setting along with her nuanced understanding of her personal physique, triggering a trajectory and new paths of movement that create different spatial constructions.

With “Dolorem Ipsum,” Ok.E. has created new, all-encompassing installations for the 2 exhibition halls of the Kestner Gesellschaft, the place she continues the central considerations of her kinetic and body-orientated works within the fields of video, sculpture, efficiency, drawing, and collage. The discussion board Silence in my Pocket features a central tiled sq. with a flowing fountain. Contorted canine sculptures lined in marzipan linger subsequent to brutalist bus stops and ominous sound domes. On a newly designed picket shelf within the arcades, Ok.E. shows older works and private artifacts that replicate her inventive observe with references to stays, the human physique, dance choreographies, and architectural design, as if positioned on the workbench of a studio archive. Concurrently, the domed corridor engages in a dialogue with the rehearsal area “Dolorem Ipsum,” with its poetic ballet bars and monolithic video set up. The area is charged with profound ideas about feminism, ballet, and the obsession with the digital self. In a poetic approach, Ok.E. displays flows of motion and on the similar time examines spatial constellations of bodily and psychological boundaries that stage and anchor social experiences of energy, violence, and freedom in architectural environments.

The enigmatic but acquainted exhibition title “Dolorem Ipsum” refers back to the custom of the placeholder textual content “Lorem ipsum . . . ,” whose phrases are visually recognizable but absurdly incomprehensible, endlessly repeatable as a philosophical textual content by Cicero on ache and pleasure from antiquity, a dummy textual content with no immediately decipherable which means that refers back to the ambivalence between philosophical concepts of ache and pleasure. With the exhibition title, Ok.E. consciously takes up her continuous investigation and critique of normative linguistic and textual content techniques and their social impacts—a subject that has occupied her since her engagement with the Georgian alphabet and the Asomtavruli script.

Curated by
Adam Budak, Alexander Wilmschen

at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover 
till June 30, 2024