Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen

About

In the solo exhibition Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen (Grasping Hands with Feet), Dana Lorenz explores how biographical experiences, social origins and traumas actively inscribe themselves in the body and leave their traces. The body becomes an infrastructure in its own right.

The artist's own biography forms the starting point for the expansive installation, an assemblage consisting of objects, readymades, photographs and a sound collage, which is expanded by an artist's book with texts, a personal glossary and image archive. Having grown up in a working-class milieu in post-reunification East Berlin, Dana Lorenz devotes herself to experiences of social exclusion and participation, in which moments between shame and resistance become an individual ordeal.

How do social exclusions shape bodies? How do processes of discrimination with regard to class and sexuality, as well as the resulting emotions and affects, manifest themselves in bodies? How is the perception of bodies shaped by our social position?

Sensitively but also humorously, Dana Lorenz negotiates the body as a grasping, touching, holding, biting, fighting, crunching, sticky, gentle, resilient, wafting product of society, which is, however, at the same time also its actor.

The dialogically interrelated works create a spatial installation that bears witness to connections between biographical memories and personal coping strategies, linking them to aesthetics of the early 2000s and the present. Lorenz creates moments of liberation, rebellion and physical unruliness. So-called bad feelings are reinterpreted and make it clear that our real strength is to be found in vulnerability.

Grasping hands with feet thus becomes a queer and feminist infrastructural critique of the body and its structural and temporary environments.