TOWER BREATH BODY MEMBRANE

+359 Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria

2022

In her first solo exhibition for the +359 Gallery in Sofia, Stella Geppert considers architecture, the body and its surroundings as a single interdependent organic system that is both in resonance and constantly in communication.
Stella Geppert‘s performance RE: EMPATHY THE NATURE kicks off the exhibition, which she dedicates to the five most important human organs – kidney, stomach, liver, heart, and lungs. These are assigned vertically to the respective floors in the tower in proportion to the body. For the first time, the artist works with embodied sounds that she initiates to stimulate the organs.

Those sounds form associations with other species and landscape sound fields in a composition. Ruth Wiesenfeld‘s composition SOUNDS FOR THE ORGANS (2022), was created from the body-based lutes of Stella Geppert. While the audience finds itself in the artist‘s mirror prostheses MIRROR SPINE“ (2022), an entanglement also arises on the architectural level in the form of a space-consuming mirror installation that Stella Geppert conceives as a spinal column.

In the series of drawings entitled CONSTITUTIONS OF THE BODIES, Stella Geppert explores the body‘s and its organs‘ material and energetic states. The artist follows assignments to plasmatic, gaseous, liquid, solid, and earthy energies and combines emotionally intense and existentially threatening states of fear, anger, grief, and disgust on the one hand and psychological factors on the other. As body prints, they become psychogeographical maps, which Stella Geppert combines with frottages so-called CONSTITUTIONS OF THE BODIES – SEASIDE DRAWINGS (2022) of different substrates, such as concrete and sandy soil.

The actions of the series H-MM-A-ZI-E are understood as artistic operations and as a kind of healing measure to restructure the relationship of the organs to nature. The artist performed organ massages on herself, the gestural movements are drawn on a canvas. Using various organ-related breathing techniques, Stella Geppert initiates communication of the inner organs with the architecture of the water tower and multiplies her body tension into space. The basis for this is her physical movements and drawings, all of which become traces of energy fields in the exhibition, called TOWER BREATH BODY MEMBRANE.