Exhibition Opening - Sonja Bäumel: Animated Bodies (Vienna)

Sonja Bäumel – Entangled Relations: Animated Bodies
MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art – Feb 01 to Apr 30, 2023 Vienna (Austria)

The performed and multisensory installation by the artist Sonja Bäumel aims to stimulate the cultural imagination via the potential of microorganisms. It seeks to alter our perception of the boundaries of the human body and explores what the microbial paradigm shift may mean for cross-beings boundaries. Exploring the vital relationships, bonds, and interconnections between our bodies and the microbes that cohabit them, it invites visitors to wonder, observe, and understand what it might mean to embody the human in a more-than-human world.

40,000 times.

Magnified 40,000 times, a larger-than-life sculpture of an amoeba expands in multiple directions, linking piece by piece with the transparent fragments of a human figure riddled with microbial inclusions. The dynamic projection of a real amoeba overlays the installation and is accompanied by sound transmitting the bubbling vitals of the microbial world. The installation will be brought to life by choreographer and performer Doris Uhlich on several occasions.

Human bodies.

By unfolding, shifting, and fragmenting the so-called boundaries of the human bodies, the installation exposes the entanglement and constant exchange with the microbial milieus living on, in, and around it, revealing yet unknown forms of movement, intelligence, and communication.