GINTARĖ SOKELYTĖ
SONJA YAKOVLEVA

04.05.-04.08.2024

Frankfurter Kunstverein
Steinernes Haus am Römerberg
Markt 44
60311 Frankfurt am Main

Curated by Franziska Nori

In the exhibition Who has Power? Striking Bodies, the Frankfurter Kunstverein has invited two emerging Frankfurt-based artists, Gintarė Sokelytė and Sonja Yakovleva, to present their largest institutional solo shows so far. With powerful new works, they have created self-sufficient pictorial spaces in which the question of power is posed subversively—what power are bodies exposed to, and what power is exercised by bodies in public space?

Sonja Yakovleva has been creating monumental papercuts with exuberant pictorial compositions for years. She became known for her ironic pop-feminist motifs, which developed into a manifesto of self-empowered female physicality. In this current exhibition, she looks at class issues and power relations in an achievement-oriented society. Yakovleva caricatures the cult of the body, the obsession with beauty and the competitiveness of today’s fitness culture as symptoms of internalised norms. In her visual worlds, she stages and reveals the work performed on one’s own body as a means of dictating a compulsion to perform. As a counterpoint to this, Yakovleva examines labour as a necessity both for people and for the functioning of cities and society as a whole.

Gintarė Sokelytė is a sculptor and filmmaker, but also draws and paints. The body, and its inner landscapes, has always formed the core of her research. It is seen as an instrument through which the self experiences the world and its own existence. For the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Sokelytė has created a completely self-contained space that she allows us to enter. She questions the power of unspoken fears and how it can be tamed, exploring a timeless urge with which one resists the uncertain through order and form. Her human figures are the field on which the power of an eternal struggle is played out.

Who has Power? Striking Bodies is an invitation to take a sensual approach to contemporary phenomena through the works of Sonja Yakovleva and Gintarė Sokelytė. The exhibition is embedded in the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s programmatic focus, which is committed to promoting emerging artists from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region and presenting innovative perspectives on social issues.