|
Alexandra Bircken’s multifaceted practice explores relationships between the body, technology, and social structures. Unfolding in an ambivalent universe – cyborg, androgynous and corporeal – her work interrogates human behavior and desire, as well as the vulnerability of bodies in relationship to objects of human invention. Bircken began her career in fashion in the mid-1990s and gradually turned towards sculpture in the 2000s. Noticeably, her work retains a marked interest in textiles, materiality and methods of assembly. Her formal vocabulary draws equally on anatomy and engineering, textile craftsmanship and industrial design – testing how these fields echo, contour and engage the human body. The hybrid forms Bircken creates can be read as metaphors for bodies subjected to norms (whether aesthetic, gendered or productive) or traversed by flows of information and power. She gives form to states of tension: attraction and repulsion, protection and exposure, desire and violence. Her subversions of objects and equipment related to mobility evoke speed, performance, and masculinity, which she fragments and reconfigures. Her exhibition SomaSemaSoma at Capc, Bordeaux presents a selection of emblematic works from the past decade within a parcours conceived as a journey through bodies – individual bodies, social bodies, mechanized bodies – offering an opportunity to grasp the coherence and radicality of a body of work that questions the very conditions of our contemporary corporeality. This survey of Bircken’s practice began at Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne, and has since traveled to Culturgest, Lisbon, before arriving at Capc, Bordeaux. Further solo presentations of her work have been held at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2022); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2021); KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021); Fridericianum, Kassel (2020); Secession, Vienna (2019); Studio Voltaire, London (2018); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2017); and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014), amongst others. For more information, please contact us here.
|
