Soma of the Land

With the installation Soma of the Land Petja Ivanova shows objects floating in space that deal with different states of the human body. The Ivanova stages her fragile sculptures entitled Emotional Exo-Bodies together with silk prints and a video projection of 3D-scanned healing springs in Bulgaria.

The exhibition attempts to make it possible to experience the vulnerable but also self-healing human body in connection with the living environment. For her work, Ivanova travelled to sacred water springs, caves and villages in Bulgaria and to places of ritual practices. Based on these experiences, she thematises alternative forms of knowledge production as well as self-developed techniques and materials in her works.

Ivanova has been experimenting with fermentation for a long time: this refers to procedures based on natural processes or the work of microorganisms that can enter into various symbiotic relationships with the human body. The Emotional Exo-Bodies are fermented exoskeletons of insects, which she processes into bandages. Their wound-healing properties offer both physical and emotional protection. Ivanova thus opens up a dialogue about the multidimensionality of human feeling - as porous, always interrelated, interdependent and mutually supportive.

Petja Ivanova (*1986), born in Bulgaria, is an artist, lecturer and performer whose practice takes place in her Berlin-based “Studio for Poetic Futures and Speculative Ecologies”. With her artistic-research works she introduces poetic, emotional and psychic relationships to the living world into digital art. She studied Visual Communication and Computational/Generative Art at Berlin University of the Arts and taught Speculative Design at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, where she received the 2021 Teaching Award. Her group exhibitions include Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings, New Now Festival, 3hd Festival - Echo Chambers and Our Data Bodies for transmedia prelude. In 2023 the book “SPECOLOGY – Zu einer ästhetischen Forschung”, co-edited with Anke Haarmann, Alice Lagaay, Tom Bieling, Torben Körschkes, Frieder Bohaumilitzky and Barbro Scholz, was published. Soma of the Land is Petja Ivanova’s first institutional solo exhibition.

Soma of the Land is at Museum Folkwang, Essen, from 06. Sep – 20. Oct 2024.

SPECOLOGY (Adocs Publ.) Foto: Stiftung Buchkunst