Art
Karolina Rupp swims between worlds. In her ongoing project Sealing Practice, Rupp explores the seal: a creature equally at home on land and in water. She works with neoprene, the material of wetsuits that protects humans from cold waters and makes the inaccessible accessible.
For Boring Festival, Rupp extends Sealing Practice into a participatory performance, with sewn neoprene sculptures of imaginary water and sea creatures. Through guided visualisation, she invites the public to feel their bodies in relation to these soft, interactive sculptures. Boundaries blur. You become part of something stranger, wetter, something more-than-human.
After the performance, the soft sculptures remain in the space, washed-up creatures waiting for your touch. Her question: where does your body end and the world begin?
Rupp grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, where she studied sociology, anthropology and photography. In 2016 she moved to the Netherlands, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in The Hague and studied Performance Practices at ArtEZ. Her work inhabits the porous boundary between human and more-than-human.
