As a post-pathological sculptor, techno-trickster and anti-presence performer, Julia Hainz explores an area that the artist describes as
para- (=besides) somatic (=physical)
With the discovery of the unconscious, the illusion of being the „master in one‘s own house“ began to unravel. As the history of hysteria testifies, this happened explicitly under sexist, racist and classist conditions. Our bodies have always already been inscribed in it. In relation to this, what might a practice look like, that seeks to focus on the precarious situation of always being both a product and a producing part of these systems?
If we can never be completely with ourselves, Julia Hainz suggests medial translation exercises for questioning learned behavior in a processual way and trying to create spaces of possibility, that therefore aren´t conceived
as an outside, but as besides. For that Julia Hainz usually works with the documentation of physical exercises as images or objects and overwriting them again performatively.
In this way, the artist creates post-participative installations to activate body knowledge, autofictional selfies as body images and performances that follow certain myths of physical presence, such as instructions for collective rehearsals.
Julia Hainz has already practiced para-somatic exercises at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2024), Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt (2021 & 2023), Künstlerhaus Nuremberg (2021 & 2022), Kunsthalle & Kunstverein Schweinfurt, (2020), Kunstpalais Erlangen (2018 & 2020) and at Young Urban Performance Festival in Osnabrück (2019).
The Frankfurt (Main) based artist works as a lecturer and artistic researcher in the department of art education at Kunsthochschule Kassel and is writing on a PhD thesis on the criticism of fluid body images in (queer-)feminist performance art. Julia Hainz works in a permanent partnership with the media artist Carmen Westermeier, currently in their projekt
THE SYMBIOTIC APPROACH.
Julia Hainz 