Lena Mai Merle (Germany/New Zealand)

 
Lena Mai Merle is an intermedial artist currently based in Wuppertal. In her practice, she deals with the depiction of inscription and different ways of seeing, reading, and interpreting it. This encompasses a crossroad of group relations, identity construction, autobiography, narrativization, othering, rhetorics and role structures. By weaving an entanglement of associations through image and text, her painted objects and figures not only exist as equals in this new dimension but can act beyond their ascriptions.

What language does an image need to catch that single, suspenseful second of a shift out of character, a Verrücktheit? During her residency, Lena will playfully research how to depict a falling out of character. Along with the concepts of performativity and what lurks behind a reflection, she opens a fissure into her rhizomical research and invites the outside, meaning you, in to probe and contemplate these questions together.