Alexandra Bircken: Unruhe – An Exhibition Exploring Human Body, Gender, and Sculptural Identity

Alexandra Bircken's exhibition 'Unruhe' delves into themes of the human body, its coverings, and the boundaries between internal and external states. The show features new sculptural works exploring gender, body, machine, power, and vulnerability.

Alexandra Bircken's exhibition 'Unruhe' investigates the human body as defined by its various 'hüllen'—skins and clothing—and its relationship with the world. The artist focuses on the permeable boundary between inside and outside, conceptualizing it as a membrane, seam, or interface. For 'Unruhe,' Bircken developed numerous new works weaving together themes of gender, body and machine, power, and vulnerability. The exhibition includes new installations like 'Deflated Figures (Rosa/Blau),' which use latex suits to explore the tension between empty body shells and the spectral presence of the body. Through stereotyped colors and variable gendered characteristics, Bircken scrutinizes gender-bound clichés. Prints on mirror-polished stainless steel reflect viewers, making them active participants and blurring the lines between clothing and the body. The juxtaposition of the textile's warm, tactile quality with the cold, flat metal highlights the materiality of representation. Bircken's oeuvre is characterized by an interest in fragments and interfaces, revealing the vulnerability of bodies alongside the structure and materiality of surfaces. Her objects focus on the interplay between cuts, divisions, and the hinges or joints that reconnect them. Rigid objects are imbued with a mobility and flexibility that can be interpreted as a symptom of our time, reflecting the constant demand to exert oneself, stretch, and bend, leading to inner unrest. The artist's method of appropriating things and materials allows them to retain their autonomy while being integrated into new contexts. By interlocking disparate elements, Bircken assigns them different, often alienating identities, a concept that permeates both the exhibition's conception and the nature of individual sculptures. For instance, a Yamaha R6 racing machine is fitted with curved wooden runners instead of wheels, causing it to move back and forth like a rocking horse, incapable of moving forward despite a functional drive. Bircken employs the sensual materiality and symbolic properties of her assemblages to generate often opposing associations, linking the machine motif as an instrument of power, intoxication, and freedom with connotations of the childlike, the handcrafted, and the organic. A special artist's book, reproducing Bircken's 1986 diary calendar, accompanies the exhibition. The handwritten entries reveal the thoughts of the then 18-year-old artist, her youthful identity formation, and life planning, with passages deliberately blacked out by the artist, creating a symbolic addition that bridges the 33-year gap between the two time planes.

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