Art
Karolina Rupp’s work often engages with the porous boundaries between human and more-thanhuman through performance, sculpture and installation. Recently she has worked with the seal which is a liminal creature living on land and at sea. Land and sea belong to the lifeworld of the seal, as one habitat instead of two separate spaces.
Through this ongoing project titled Sealing Practice, Rupp explores, amongst other things, neoprene wetsuits as second skin, as thresholds. Wetsuits protect humans, for example, from cold water, making it possible to connect to a place that is otherwise inaccessible. Simultaneously wetsuits become a threshold in themselves: between human and water, body and environment, self and other, etc.
Consealing, deriving from Sealing Practice, is an installation and participatory performance work blending notions of human, object, aliveness, audience, performer and participant through neoprene soft sculptures and a wetsuit-wearing performer. The concepts of porosity and boundaries are explored through an almost therapeutic effect brought about by the haptic engagement of the audience with the work and the work with the audience.
Although born in Germany, Karolina Rupp grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, where she studied sociology, anthropology, and photography. She worked in commercial photography while developing an analogue, lens-based art practice at a local studio. Since 2016, she is based in the Netherlands, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and a MA in Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts. Karolina has developed and presented work in various international residency programs and exhibitions, with a practice grounded in embodied research, site-specificity, and collaborative artistic processes.
Relationscapes: Encounters is an exhibition featuring six international performance artists reflecting on the theme of borders. Borders are contradictory; they protect and exclude, they reveal and conceal, they are physical and psychological, visible and invisible. Relationscapes: Encounters explores both the porosity and fluidity of these borders. A variety of themes such as chronic online presence, war trauma, power structures versus non-hierarchical systems and liminal beings are being investigated. The exhibition features installations, video, and live performances by Finn Adrian Jorkjen, Toni Brell, Karolina Rupp, Maja Zećo, Greig Burgoyne and Lola Bezemer.
