POLY. A Fluid Show
Kindl | Berlin | Germany
17 October 2023 – 25 February 2024
As part of the exhibition programme POLY, created by Solvej Helweg Ovesen
POLY – From Mono- to Polycultures
Flexibility, multitasking, and parallel lives—these modi operandi characterize transitions of all kinds. They are fluid and polymorphic. Transitions connect us through a profoundly human experience, as we all transform throughout our lives—especially in this moment of polycrises.
The artists featured in the various POLY exhibitions documented in this publication work in transdisciplinary ways. Often starting from painting, their practices engage with themes of hustling, blending, queering, and crossing or dissolving boundaries—whether between nations, genders, generations, digital or analogue worlds, or even materials.
These transitions—human, (im)material, digital, and ideological—reflect the multiplicity of the self. Their artistic approaches to material and narrative express the non-binary nature of today’s zeitgeist. The artworks and accompanying texts in this publication outline what we might call a polycentric culture.
This culture reveals itself, for example, in the instability of haptic form and material consistency in the arts—emerging in contrast to the traditional medium of painting—at a historical moment marked by environmental and social polycrises.
Text by Solvej Ovesen
In POLY. A Fluid Show, Raquel van Haver presents sculptural paintings shaped by time. The four works on view in this exhibition reflect on the queer community in Colombia and are part of the Amo a la Reina series, which the artist originally presented in 2020 and 2021 at the Bonnefanten Museum in the Netherlands. With heavy textures and wild flora, her work explores non-binary identities, intersectional struggles, and polymorphic existence, embodying the fluid transitions shaping our contemporary lives and selves.
