Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen

In the solo exhibition Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen [Grasping the Hands With the Feet], Dana Lorenz explores how biographical experiences, social background, and trauma actively inscribe themselves in the body and leave behind their traces. The body thereby becomes an independent and interdependent infrastructure. The artist’s own biography is the starting point for the expansive installation, which comprises an assemblage consisting of objects, readymades, photographs, and a sound collage that is expanded through an artist book with text, a personal glossary, and an image archive. Having grown up in a working-class milieu in post-reunification East Berlin, Dana Lorenz’s work focuses on experiences of social exclusion and participation, in which moments between shame and resistance become individual ordeals. How do social exclusions form bodies? How do processes of discrimination manifest themselves in light of class and sexuality as well as the resulting emotions and affects in bodies? How is the perception of bodies shaped by our social position? These considerations are based on the artist’s examination of class as a social construction as well as questions of class origin and class membership, which are directly linked to both individual and collective bodies (of experience). In a sensitive, but also humorous manner, Dana Lorenz negotiates the body as a grasping, touching, holding, biting, fighting, grinding, sticky, soft, resilient, billowing product of society, which at the same time is also its agent.With the dialogically interrelated works, the center of which forms an outsized medical mouth guard – an expression of deeply rooted and resistant tensions – Dana Lorenz creates an installation that testifies to proliferating connections between biographical memories and personal coping strategies, linking them to the politics and aesthetics of the early 2000s and the present. Dana pursues different consistencies, plays with ambiguities, and thereby creates moments of liberation, rebellion, and physical unruliness. So-called bad feelings are reinterpreted and make clear that our actual strength is to be found in vulnerability. Die Hände mit den Füßen fassen [Grasping the Hands With the Feet], thus becomes a queer and feminist infrastructural critique of the body and its structural and transitory environments.