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Blistered Relics | Poojan Gupta
This November at Art Mumbai 2025, artist Poojan Gupta presented a materially driven series of works, solidifying the direction of her practice.
11 min read
Rewriting Belonging | Maria Gvardeitseva
Through performance, video, and archival installation, Gvardeitseva rewrites personal and cultural autonomy in the wake of exile and transformative change.
8 min read
Healing Portals | Jessica Vollrath
Jessica Vollrath opens up an intimate conversation around self-discovery, motherhood, and how the desire to truly know oneself is an evolving process.
10 min read
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![Rebecca Horn, Der Eintänzer (The Dancer), 1978, stills from her first avant-garde feature film.
“At the age of 21, after damaging her lungs through prolonged exposure to toxic materials at art school, Rebecca Horn spent a year convalescing. Confined to her sick bed, she began experimenting with prosthetics and restrictive choreographies[…]Shaped through the prism of youthful illness, Horn’s understanding of bodily movement instigated a career-long reckoning with corporeal limitations.
The artist studied ballet growing up in postwar Germany. Her father would take her to see live performances in Munich and Vienna, sparking a lifelong fascination for the discipline, and ballet dancers often featured in her experimental documentaries of the 1970s and ’80s. In Der Eintänzer (The Dancer, 1978), for instance, filmed in the artist’s New York studio, one dancer performs in Horn’s The Feathered Prison Fan (1978) – a wing-like sculpture, made from white ostrich feathers, which metamorphoses its wearer into a human-animal hybrid, at once alluring and fantastical. Reminiscent of a large, somewhat surreal tutu, the feathered contraption envelops the dancer, seemingly swallowing her whole.
The confinement and isolation Horn experienced in ill health appear to have informed the ways in which her body sculptures act out unsettling forms of suffocation or ingestion. In another scene from Der Eintänzer, two dancers face each other, bound together by Horn’s sculpture Body Harp (1978). One dancer’s arms are connected to the other’s legs: in an almost perversely symbiotic relationship, they need each other to be able to move. Der Eintänzer’s motifs – which recur throughout Horn’s practice, as in her film La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa (1981) – read like a form of unconscious symbolism synonymous with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach: an uncanny engagement or a series of recollections of memory, desire and fear.”[Excerpt from Frieze 246, ‘Dance’]
#RebeccaHorn](https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-15/634545175_17971257134946589_7751604336487677453_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_e35_tt6&_nc_cat=107&ccb=7-5&_nc_sid=18de74&efg=eyJlZmdfdGFnIjoiQ0FST1VTRUxfSVRFTS5iZXN0X2ltYWdlX3VybGdlbi5DMyJ9&_nc_ohc=8RyVJyYgSIoQ7kNvwH5T-U6&_nc_oc=Adkt5dEfR50t-exqkPvGIhm-lkSRouT0VAgfl0w0hjiSmBCZtXkFT8H95FBD0tefdEU&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&_nc_gid=j9z-mMoxMppVFMxtOZb4Hg&_nc_tpa=Q5bMBQGFjqHbfjaflckJZ9Tq-tox6WGzWAEyDdMnPja8EZFZUi9jMRW80BUTB11fL0YD1m5R_GH80jHq&oh=00_Afteq5Z3DkhFpGx52r_0K5j7mmcuvBsOSYCteaIFiiMiFw&oe=69993799)
