Opening, February 4, 2025, 6 pm
Exhibition, February 5 – March 21, 2025
Maruša Sagadin works with sculpture and spatial concepts. With her background in sculpture and architecture, her artistic practice invariably engages in discourses on collective spaces. In the exhibition Thick Skin, Yet I’m Cold, the artist explores the permeability of places we encounter on a daily basis, while questioning their usability and function. Communal places, such as street crossings or public infrastructures, are embedded in an expanded context that provokes a break with habitual perceptions. Inspired by feminist readings of spatial production, Sagadin’s artistic approach employs metaphorical disruptions to break up entrenched categories and open hegemonic structures to interventions, which manifests as an ambiguity in her works, be it in materiality, language, or choice of colors.
Drawing upon previous reflections on the potentials residing in everyday places or infrastructures such as benches or sidewalk curbs,* the exhibition at Kunstraum Lakeside now focuses on the medium of paper in public space, namely advertising posters. The artist paints over the posters and glues them together, reinforcing them with aluminum foil at the edges to form them into shape. When hung, rolled, or folded, the paper resembles objects such as blinds, curtains, or partition screens—surfaces intended to protect, conceal, divide, or decorate spaces. In the interplay between surface, space, and abstraction, Sagadin reveals various dimensions of the sculptural. Paper is her material: layers of paint and other papers are applied one on top of the other. She incorporates gestures of minimalism, playing with the volumes and structural forms that take shape through an impasto and relief-like application of paint and repeated folding while adding paper and pigment layers. The colors chosen—from yellow to a vivid blue and purple to black—resonate with the gamut found in urban space and its subcultures. Sagadin’s sculptural folded objects introduce a visual link between architecture and design by drawing clear lines and geometric shapes in the space. Paper becomes a versatile medium, far more than just a carrier of information, rather an object in its own right: its large, expressive folds and bends invite a wealth of interpretations. The folding techniques lend the paper a sculptural and tactile quality that prompts us to reflect on the functional and aesthetic qualities of everyday materials.
Maruša Sagadin’s manipulations of paper can be read as a take on malfunctions or disruptions, as the material itself is stripped of its original function and meaning through folding, combination, and reconfiguration. Similar to a glitch in digital systems, the paper is displaced from its usual context and transformed into a new, unexpected state. “Errors bring new movement into static space; this motion makes an error difficult to see but its interference ever present.”** With its rectangular, segmented surfaces, Walls (2022) conjures the image of a bed quilt or a padded wall that could swallow up sounds, voices, and noises. Bulgy and soft, akin to the works of Alina Szapocznikow, Sagadin asserts her signature tenor of exaggeration and humor. “They empower users to cultivate a personal response and explore how their lived experiences and their bodies, in all shapes and sizes, relate to these forms and environments.”*** It is these subtle contradictions and incongruities in her works—stages without purpose, roofs with holes, unwearable accessories—that turn a visit to the exhibition into a performative experience where the visitors themselves become participants. For Sagadin, touching the works, merging with them, and thereby claiming the space is an integral aspect of the artwork. This transformation breaks with the normative expectations of paper as an information carrier, assigning it a sculptural, almost performative role. Taking this feminist approach to revealing the permeability of categories, spaces, or even standard ascriptions and questioning prescribed classifications, Sagadin wields collective and performative aspects of disruption to access spaces for queer and feminist identities. In this light, the artist’s sculptural works initiate a collective dialogue between material, space, and viewer. The newly connotated paper objects refer to movements and changes in urban space while serving as acts of transformation in themselves. Analogous to the renegotiation of identities and conventions in Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, the artist challenges us to rethink our habitual manners of encountering everyday materials and urban structures.
Sagadin’s works convey this, above all, through their ambiguity: in their material appearance, their use of language, their colors. With bodily features such as noses and eyes, the artist conceals the screws and seams needed for stability, yet at the same time emphasizes these functional details with a postmodern fascination by highlighting them with elements such as spirals or scissors. At first glance, these elements, which the artist calls “props,” appear to be attached to the paper only superficially, like loose accessories, but in fact they are firmly anchored. Humor and exaggeration surface once more: she inverts the large into the small and vice versa, nudging us to the borders of trauma and disgust with her material experiments. The large drops on the inside and outside of the window panes, Drop (blue) and Drop (red) (2023), are reminiscent of mushrooms; their brittle, furrowed surface suggests the anatomy of hearts or, in the case of the red drop, an eviscerated cadaver, but they are merely enlargements of the typical props from Sagadin’s inventory of forms.
The glitch, for the artist, is not just a visual disruption—it is a concept that symbolically reflects the complexity and disorder in the world today. By integrating the glitch as an aesthetic principle in her work, Maruša Sagadin draws the viewer’s attention to the unstable, fluid nature of perception and encourages them to see the world as a place of constant change and uncertainty.
In collaboration with and text by: Marie Oucherif
Maruša Sagadin (b. 1978 in Slovenia) lives and works in Vienna.
www.sagadin.at
* Cf. Marie Oucherif (ed.), Maruša Sagadin. Luv Birds in toten Winkeln (Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2023).
** Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism. (London: Verso, 2020), 74.
*** Persilia Caton, “Warm Hands, Warm Bench,” in Maruša Sagadin. Wet Feet, ed. Alenka Gregorič, exh. cat. (Ljubljana: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana/Cukrarna Gallery, 2022), 17.
