Markus Ambach

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 glamour 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. 

In addition to the figure in the Art Factors shop window, there are other figures by Isabella Fürnkäs scattered among the shop displays on the way towards Viehofer Platz. Wherever they appear, they either counteract or imperceptibly blend into the shop window and the world of commodities being showcased in it. Whether at the bridal store; the fetish shop; or Enza Home, a bed retailer whose upper level houses a private Turkish jazz club; Fürnkäs’ transhuman figures comment on the window displays in their ambivalent constitution between gender roles and queerness, dystopia and fashion fetishism, drawing shoppers’ focus to the interplay of intimacy and publicity, belief and conviction, vision and “naked reality”.