A giant, deconstructed body – part animal, part human – welded from a metal frame, with oversized items of clothing and brightly-coloured costumes that visitors may try on, transport crates and collages of material, unfolds to create an immersive landscape in the extensive installation My Body Is Not An Island by the Czech artist and film-maker Eva Koťátková. Stories both factual and fictional telling of physical and mental oppression are written into the work. Tales from the perspectives of humans, animals and plants are activated every week by the performer and can be supplemented with the public’s own experiences.
Originating from her own interest in social structures – such as the family, schools, or work – in this art work, Eva Koťátková explores the question of how normalisation processes shape our everyday lives and can give rise to forms of excessive (self-)control, violence and fear.
Influenced by the poetics of surrealism and theatrical stage designs, the artist has created an inclusive place in which we can face our dreams and our unconscious. My Body Is Not An Island invites children, young people and adults alike to empathise with others and to learn how to use emotions as a way in to the world: Bring your emotions and your jackets too, the artist tells us.
Urbane Künste Ruhr makes its own artistic contribution to each Ruhrtriennale. Following up on Ruhr Ding: Schlaf, an exhibition project across several cities early this summer that addressed our relationship with the body and time in a post-industrial context, it has invited Eva Koťátková to create a site-specific version of My Body Is Not An Island at Liebfrauenkirche Duisburg after the work had previously been seen in Bordeaux and Prague.
Produced by Urbane Künste Ruhr for Ruhrtriennale
- Hours
Exhibition duration
12.8.—23.9.
Wed—Sun
12—7 pm
Performances
Thu
5—7 pm
Sat
2—5 pm
- Address
Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg
König-Heinrich-Platz 3
47051 Duisburg
Events
can you repeat it? A workshop with artist Maria Renée Morales Garcia
In her installation My Body Is Not An Island, Eva Koťátková deals with questions that revolve around empathy and various forms of care: The workshop can you repeat it? with artist Maria Renée Morales Garcia takes up these themes and will work with words and sentence fragments from the exhibition in a protected setting. Participants will be able to engage intensively with the installation and experience empowerment through the sharing of stories. Finally, ceramic letters will be reassembled in unexpected combinations and taken home as a lasting memory.
Participation from 16 years after registration at kunstvermittlung@urbanekuensteruhr.de.
can you repeat it? A workshop with artist Maria Renée Morales Garcia
Participation from 16 years after registration at kunstvermittlung@urbanekuensteruhr.de.
BLACKOUTS! A workshop with the poet Lütfiye Güzel
Deleting words, blackening sentences and putting something new together from the remaining gaps in the text: In her workshop BLACKOUTS! the poet Lütfiye Güzel gives practical insights into her lyrical technique of the same name.
In her poems, Lütfiye Güzel observes the everyday and the human between humour and melancholy and at the same time paints a pointed, socio-critical picture of the present. The resistant potential of Lütfiye Güzel's poetry is also evident in the way she incorporates materiality and craft into her works: newspaper clippings assembled into collages yield a different meaning, and passages of text are given a new interpretation by deleting words or sentences.
Lütfiye Güzel, born in Duisburg in 1972 and travelling between the Ruhr and Berlin, is a poet and has been publishing poems under her own label go-güzel-publishing since 2014. In 2017, Lütfiye Güzel was awarded the Ruhr Literature Prize, and in 2014 she was the recipient of the Fakir Baykurt Culture Prize. Her current book "ich.soll.ruhiger.werden." was published in 2023.
Participation from 16 years after registration via kunstvermittlung@urbanekuensteruhr.de.
