The show SchwesterSchwester by Ines Doujak is the first solo presentation of the Klagenfurt-born artist at GALERIE3. For over 30 years, Doujak has staged performances and installations, created sculptures, photographs and films, written song lyrics and produced publications. Her works have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Liverpool Biennial (2021), Bergen Assembly (2019), Sao Paulo Biennial (2014), Busan Biennial (2012) and documenta 12 (2007). There are also important solo exhibitions, including at the Kunsthalle Wien (2021/2022), the MMKK in Klagenfurt (2023) and the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2018).

For the works exhibited in SchwesterSchwester, Doujak combines found, donated and purchased objects – useless things that have accumulated over the years and that the artist transforms into wondrous assemblages: be it hundreds of apricot seeds painted black, a mammoth bone, a music roll, a 2000-year-old textile work from Peru or a marionette whose leg is hanging by a thread. The exhibition also includes analog photographs rediscovered by the artist from her late student days.

At the back of the gallery is a selection from the prominent series Geistervölker (Ghost Peoples, since 2015), which was also shown at CARA in New York this year.

In the collages, the artist deals with the global spread of viruses and the associated colonial structures and mechanisms of oppression.The human and animal, plant and inorganic intertwine and combine to form hybrid creatures that are characterized by great ambivalence.Doujak’s works thus release an energy that is both dark and playful. They are surrounded by an eccentric shimmering that pulls deep into the pit of the stomach in its eerie yet seductive undertow, and which has nothing to do with idealistic wholeness and purity.Instead, the focus is on the brutal and uncontrollable, the raw flesh of things and its offbeat blossoms.

Although located in fiction, the artist’s works are far removed from an escapist flight from the world. On the contrary – with the means of montage and the grotesque, a very unique realism breaks through, which makes abstract global power relations concrete in the abject and the outsider. By elevating the marginalized, the artist ignites directly at the heart of our system, addressing and deconstructing exploitative structures, classism and normative gender identities.In her search for forms of resistance, Doujak repeatedly mobilizes signs of political activism, collectivity and solidarity. Text:Ramona Heinlein