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Folkwang und die Stadt

Place: Museum Folkwang, Essen

Date: -

Artists: atelier le balto, Neil Beloufa, Anne Berlit, Jeremy Deller, Paula Erstmann, Mascha Fehse, Isabella Fürnkäs, Folke Köbberling, Anouk Kruithof, Gabriela Oberkofler, Performance Electrics, Polymer DMT / Fang Yun Lo, Fari Shams, Simon Starling

Curated by: Markus Ambach & Peter Gorschlüter

Works: Blind Land, Amygdala, Unpredictable Liars Revolt

Isabella Fürnkäs embraces the heterogeneity of Essen’s City Nord and makes use of various locations around the district, which she brings into speculative connection with each other. She creates hybrid apparitions in the consumer world – mostly based on traditional mannequins – out of everyday disposable and leftover materials, which she uses in a comparable way to costume jewellery and other accessories.

In the goth shop Dark Ages, in shop windows such as those belonging to the Enza Home furniture studio or the Art Faktors tattoo studio, on the escalator of the second-hand shelf rental scheme Konsumreform, or inside Expo Alternativ, her figures blend almost imperceptibly into their surroundings while subtly commenting on them. In their ambiguity between the affirmation of consumerism and the fetishism of fashion, they merge into an amalgam of urban neuroses.

At a time in which gender roles are being called into question by fluid (self-assigned) identities, fashion’s culture of labelling takes on a dystopian element. In Fürnkäs’s work, fashion’s symbols of glam – our collapse into worn-out cable harnesses, ruined shopping bags, and repurposed DIY supplies. In autumnal shades of blush and ruby, her transhuman figures comment on the urban locations where they are displayed, the shop windows, displays, and display cases becoming ephemeral stages in a consumer society that seems to be coming to an end and is searching for new perspectives.

- Text by Markus Ambach

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