Become a Stranger to Yourself
Olga Balema proposes fictional anatomies as metaphors for the permeability between the environment and the body, two entities which are mutually inextricable. Here, the artist has designed a pseudo-organic sculpture that hovers between the two- and three-dimensional. Torn flesh hangs from the metallic skeleton of Notes from the Capital, its membrane-like material evoking both the body and the clothes that adorn it. A deflated sheath seems to shed its substance, while the strange prostrate composition of Become a Stranger to Yourself, still retaining its substance, comes alive with autonomous mutations. Evocative masses and images float freely about, and iron turns to rust, staining water with a blood-orange hue. Olga Balema invites viewers to penetrate the body with their gaze and discover, as in this protective pod, what constitutes it and what contaminates it.