Original Features

The Kunsthaus Langenthal presents the first institutional solo exhibition by Latefa Wiersch (born in Dortmund in 1982, lives and works in Zurich). The artist uses everyday things and materials to create puppets, backdrops, and objects that develop a life of their own when staged as performances and photographic assemblages: hybrid beings that combine elements of human and animal, plant, object, and machine, and that pupate and transform. Drawing on observations of everyday life and a provocative sense of humour, these inanimate-animated actors tell stories about social realities and the life of the female artist. Dreams, sexuality, violence, love, motherhood, as well as the relation between subject and object and real and artificially produced bodies represent recurrent themes in the exhibition. In the works developed for “Original Features,” Latefa Wiersch engages with contemporary identity-political discourses to confront the gaps in her personal history as well as the prejudices and ascriptions that come with it. Inspired by the poet, scientist, and activist May Ayim and her research into Afro-German history writing, Wiersch weaves different historical storylines into a subjective, speculative narrative, which can be read as representative of the untold experiences and realities of North African migrants and their children in European countries, particularly in Germany and Switzerland. She repurposes exaggeration and satire as strategies of self-determination, speaking back to the clichés of the exotic ascribed to her and revealing them as (mis)constructions.