Lucie Sahner, Visual Arts, 2020
*1986 in Völklingen, lives in Amsterdam
Lucie Sahner is an artist who also works as a nurse. She completed her fine art studies as a Meisterschülerin (master student) with Prof. Gabriele Langendorf at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saarbrücken. She then earned a master’s degree in the Dirty Art Department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In her works, Sahner explores processes of transformation and change within the human body, but from a pivotal non-human-centric worldview. Sahner plays with both an expansion and detachment from bodily boundaries and limitations in her sculptures, installations, and prose, often employing natural materials with corporeal connotations such as gelatine, wax, cream, and latex.
Articles & Spaces
What Matters
Work Presentation 2022
“What Matters” was the question andtatement of 2022 presentation of works by the JUNGE AKADEMIE, the interdisciplinary and international artist-in-residence programme of the Akademie der Künste. In an exhibition and a multifaceted programme including screenings, concerts and readings, 29 fellows from all of the Akademie’s art sections presented sound and video installations, photographs, sculptures, paintings and performances they developed during their studio residencies in the Hansaviertel in Berlin and at Villa Serpentara in Olevano, Italy.
“What Matters” is not to be understood as the title of a thematic exhibition but rather indicates the diversity of questions, perspectives and realities that are interlaced in an artist residency, while emphasising their urgency. The exhibition focused on the artists’ individual approaches that encompass a broad spectrum of themes: from questions about the transformation of societies and their expression in relation to the urban space and landscape, to interrelations between the individual and social systems such as state, religion and the economy, to reflections on body images and conceptions of history, personal archives and the intertwining of nature, technology and culture.
What matters is artistic testimony, poetic resistance and the imagining of sustainable futures in the face of global tipping points – whether climatic or political in nature. Two years into the pandemic and the associated restrictions, “What Matters” was the most comprehensive presentation of works to date by the JUNGE AKADEMIE.
To quote one of the fellows: “What matters? Make them see…”
You´ve got Something Between Your Teeth
Installation
The installation – a human figure leaning forward, held by a large latex tube which pulls the body backwards – continues a series of works in which Lucie Sahner reflects upon the transformations in which our bodies take part. A central material component in this series of works is latex: A substance of organic origin, obtained from trees by cutting their bark, it is processed into a variety of forms which serve human needs. Such transformations of physical matter of non-human origin are what sustain human life. But despite our absolute dependance on a global-scale metabolism, into which we feed every available material, our thinking and feeling still tends to confine itself to borders between self and other. This way, we feel as though we’re able to hold on to ourselves, to preserve a relatively constant form amidst the all-consuming transformations, and all that upholds us stays external. Still, what we draw from also pulls on us.
Special thanks to SIGN Artspace, Groningen (NL)