Double Q Gallery is pleased to announce Maria Kulikovska’s solo exhibition ‘My Body is a Battlefield’ opening at Francisco Carolinum Linz, Austria on 8 September 2022. The exhibition would like to mediate insight into an artistic life that is understood as an action, that consistently tries to reconcile moral and human catastrophe with respect for the wealth and mystery of life.
Curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher of Office for Art, the exhibition includes artworks from a period of more than ten years. The artist's own body is at the centre of the work, concretely, rather than the woman's body as an abstract form. Her body is the battlefield on which and in which often-ambivalent emotions emerge and wrestle with one another. Personal experiences, disappointments, and confrontations carry out their inner struggles in this body. They wrangle over what will provide the stronger motivation: despair and fear, or confidence and courage. Whether hatred and vengeance or love and compassion are the stronger forces will be decided in this body. The dramas of fears, desires, and hopes take place in this body. Again, and again, she acts in and with her body in performative actions. She seeks reconciliation, but also forgiveness, and looks for a seemingly impossible harmony with life's beauty, per se, which in reality often shows up bloody, smeared, doomed to die, and in a miserable physical state.
With the start of Russia's open war against Ukraine, Kulikovska fled from Kyiv to western Ukraine. She has been an artist-in-residence at the OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH in Linz from March until September 2022. As part of this residency, she has had the opportunity to produce new ceramics and painted plates at the Academy of Ceramics of the Gmundener Keramik Manufaktur. Several of these most recent works will be presented at the exhibition.
My Body is a Battlefield
Francisco Carolinum Linz, Linz, Austria
8 September – 20 November 2022
