The Weight of Being
Tina Lechner
PRESS RELEASE
Curator: Domenico de Chirico
The work of Tina Lechner (born in 1981 in St. Pölten, Austria; lives and works in Vienna) identifies the female body as its field of inquiry, not as an a priori form, but as a space of negotiation. The body takes shape as a critical dispositif: an unstable surface upon which forces and structures are inscribed, constantly redefining its boundaries.
The artist handcrafts objects from paper, plaster, plastic, and fabric, which are subsequently grafted onto other bodies through a process articulated in three stages — sketch, construction, and photography — transforming the body into a morphologically and semantically ambiguous presence, often hovering between living matter and artifact, between instinctual dimension and sculptural pose.
In some of the photographic works presented in the exhibition, attention is directed toward the formal dimension: the body as bearer of geometric structures, in dialogue with the Bauhaus tradition and with the research of the German painter and sculptor Oskar Schlemmer. Indeed, in his choreographic work Triadic Ballet (1922), Schlemmer articulated the body through scenic inventions and costumes marked by a strongly constructive character, conceiving the human figure as a unity in which body, costume, and movement tend to merge. As he himself observed: “It is not easy to dance in these costumes; I believe this requires a high degree of bodily discipline in order to fuse body and costume into a single unit.” Within this perspective, the body functions simultaneously as support and framework. Yet while Schlemmer sought a harmonious synthesis between form, sensory movement, and space, Lechner introduces an additional friction: the objects or elements neither organize the body nor merely adorn it, but destabilize its composition, invading, overpowering, and at times even replacing it.
In the more recent series, this distance diminishes. The objects relate to the body in a more intrusive and less natural way, generating ever-new configurations that evoke the body without entirely coinciding with it. In certain cases, the body itself becomes an assembled object, translated into a form that preserves a trace of the human while no longer fully adhering to it.
From the perspective of analog black-and-white photography, these constellations condense into images of a statuary character, oscillating between attraction and unease. Faces remain concealed, figures elude immediate and univocal legibility, producing a perceptual disjunction in which the boundaries between body and external elements are perpetually called into question.
Within this suspension emerges a reflection rooted in Foucauldian thought, according to which identity does not appear as an essence, but as the effect of practices and dispositifs that shape it – a historical and social construction produced through discourses, institutions, and relations of power. In this sense, the figures, resembling living sculptures or cyborg-like presences, articulate a posthuman tension in which the boundary between the organic and the inorganic, between the spontaneous and the induced, gradually dissolves.
The Weight of Being thus alludes to a condition of pressure and resistance: the body emerges as the place where being takes form through breath, almost concealed beneath the weight of the structures that dominate it, yet constantly traversed by a flow of vital energy rhythmically defined by matter, space, movement, stillness, and awareness.
Tina Lechner’s work ultimately constitutes a reflection on the contemporary human condition, in which the “weight of being” is not merely corporeal but above all ontological, concerning the constructions that define – and at the same time destabilize or dismantle – what we call identity and what it means, here and now, to be human.
OBRÁZKY Z INŠTALÁCIE
