Pola Sieverding: Contact Zone

May 4 - June 10, 2023

Opening Reception:
May 4, 2023
6:00 - 8:00pm

signs and symbols is pleased to present Pola Sieverding's first US solo exhibition, Contact Zone, featuring an installation of large-format, photographic prints on gauze. Her most recent body of work, Sieverding's photographs on gauze transport her primary subject — the body, as both a physical entity and as an image — into an entirely new medium, investigating the materialities of skin and semi-transparent fabric.

In Contact Zone, textiles are suspended from the ceiling, forming and re-forming a collage of bodies as they sway, overlapping. Each veil of gauze depicts only a fragment of a body — a jawbone, a shoulder, several raised vertebrae of a spine. The gauze itself, wavering between opacity and transparency, underscores the fragility and ephemerality of skin. Within the immersive structure of the installation, these carnal images can be viewed and interpreted from multiple angles, a new perspective offered at every position. When looking with the direction of the light, the textiles are nearly opaque. But when looking against the light, the images become transparent, creating a visual effect like a double exposure. At every vantage point, the viewer is surrounded by bodies in the space, like figures performing on a stage.

Over the past few years, with increasing urgency during the pandemic, Sieverding has researched the importance of touch. Touch, sight, smell, taste, hearing — indicative of its importance, touch is the first of the five senses to develop in utero. It is the only sense that is essential for human survival. Not only is the ability to touch vital, but so is being touched. Touch, both active and receptive, has proven to influence all aspects of health from blood pressure and immune function to emotional and mental wellbeing.

To touch is also an intimate act. To Sieverding, it is a ripe metaphor for connection and exchange, as well as perception and projection. Whether skin or screen, surface or interface, our experience of the world is mediated by touch. In fact, the skin is the largest organ of the human body. It connects us to the world while at the same time separating us from it; the skin, a pervious layer, is the divider between self and other.

Not unalike skin, gauze is permeable and porous. It absorbs ink and allows light to pass through its fibers. Having previously explored the transmutation of images across media in her work Bodies That Matter, in which the artist printed photographs of ancient Greek sculptures on transparent foil, here Sieverding re-frames bodies again, from flesh and blood into photography into diaphanous gauze. Principally lens-based, she traces her images from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, further pursuing the spatial possibilities of photographs as an installation.

As a final introduction of touch and interaction, Contact Zone is ultimately an installation activated by the presence of a viewer; a performance where the bodies represented on the textiles are set into motion by bodies in the space, through gusts of air and even breath. Sieverding shifts between mediums and materials, collapsing levels of separation and distinction between subject and object, inner feeling and external being, sensory receptors and camera lens, into a single sensuous environment that intertwines tactile and technological forms of contact with the world.

pola sieverding is a visual artist working in the field of lens-based media. With photography, video and sound, she investigates the physical body as bearer of historical narratives that shape a contemporary discourse on the social body. By defining the body linguistically as an alternative to words, she exploits the classical ideal of the body as a locus of pleasure and power. She is attracted to extremes and socialized emotions, something felt when the body switches between looking and being looked at, touching and being touched. Her images explore the body as an expressive element, the way we alter our behavior when we feel ourselves to be acting, a performance of just being. Sieverding studied at the University of the Arts Berlin, CMU Pittsburgh and Surikov Institute Moscow. She was a visiting lecturer to the Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2016-2020. She has received a number of grants including a DAAD travel grant in 2008 and the Arbeitsstipendium by the Senat of Berlin in 2014. She has exhibited internationally at Art in General, New York; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (with Natascha Sadr Haghighian); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (with Orson Sieverding); Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Dubai Photo Exhibition, Dubai; NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; and MAK Museum für Angewandte und Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin.