NOURISHING GHOSTS

On the 18th of May 2023 ACRE opened Janina Frye‘s first solo show in Berlin. Her new work NOURISHING GHOSTS was developed on-site during a one-month studio residency at ACRE. Janina took her time to engage with the space and to foster her research on the manifold ways trauma is affecting the whole body as a system that equally relates to an inner- and outer sphere. While often focusing on her own body, psychological and physiological processes as a source of conceptual and material inspiration, her work also refers to scientific studies by experts on traumatic stress such as Bessel Van der Kolk. This approach allows her to translate rather subjective sensory impressions, thoughts, and emotions into material conditions that confront us with the otherwise invisible and intangible. Janina Frye’s work presents a concept of the human — a transformative system with connections, overlaps, and entanglements linking the corporeal body to the outside world. Contesting the Western world’s inherited view of the human as a discrete and singular being, through sculpture and installation she draws on critical frameworks of queer ecology, posthumanism, and post-war formalism to address how sculpture can trouble persistent cultural dualisms such as binary gender relations and the place of the human within the more-than-human world. Janina Frye lives and works in Amsterdam and Leiden as an Artist and Educator. She studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, Visual Arts, and Minor Art & Politics at the AKV St. Joost ’s-Hertogenbosch, NL. Her work was exhibited internationally at P/////AKT, Amsterdam, South London Gallery, London, and at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen et al.