Alexandra Bircken, "SomaSemaSoma"

Solo exhibition by the German artist Alexandra Bircken, exploring human behavior and desires, as well as the vulnerability of bodies in their relationship with

Capc is dedicating a major solo exhibition to the German artist Alexandra Bircken. A leading figure in the contemporary German art scene, Alexandra Bircken began her career in the fashion world in the mid-1990s.

She founded her own brand and developed her business in London and then in Paris. Upon returning to Germany in the early 2000s, she gradually turned her back on fashion.

Her garments and accessories increasingly broke away from functional categories to become works of art in their own right. Since that period, Alexandra Bircken has developed a sculptural practice that questions the relationships between the body, technology, and social structures.

She deploys an ambivalent body of work—both cyborg and androgenous—that examines human behavior and desires, as well as the vulnerability of bodies in their relationship with technology.

The hybrid forms imagined by the artist can be read as metaphors for bodies subjected to norms—aesthetic, productive, gendered—or traversed by flows of information and power.

The exhibition at Capc brings together emblematic works from the past decade in a visitor journey conceived as a traverse of bodies—individual bodies, social bodies, mechanized bodies.

SomaSemaSoma offers a rare opportunity to grasp the coherence and radical nature of a body of work that questions the very conditions of our contemporary corporeality.

Co-produced with Culturgest, Lisbon (Portugal); KBCB, Centre d’art de Bienne (Switzerland); and Marta Herford Museum (Germany)