Alexandra Bircken – ‘Leather and Latex’

Alexandra Bircken describes herself as a researcher in the field of material science whose art explores broken, injured and scarred bodies. The German artist dissects, guts, dissolves and reinterprets her subjects – often humanoid, made from rubber and animal hide – to produce works that are tender, humorous, political and profoundly honest. In her latest exhibition, Fair Game, at Berlin’s Kindl gallery, she leads us to a new understanding of our own bodies in a manner that is at once poetic, realistic, questioning and romantic.

SLEEK: Your work is amazingly cryptic and surprising.

Alexandra Bircken: It’s very much about vulnerability, injuries and how we can repair them; the question of what you can do to restore body and soul to their proper function. How to get things back into a state we can live with again.

S: Is there any particular reason why the body became your theme?

AB: Our skin, of course, is what we live in. It encases us, goes along with every move we make, no matter how tiny; it blushes, gets spots, and, if we look at it closely, it reveals a lot about the state we’re in. If someone tells you how fantastic you look because your skin looks so great, or how tired and exhausted you look, they do it based on our outside shell. We can feel it ourselves: there are times when we just want to be alone because we don’t want physical contact, or we feel hurt, perhaps. If we’re really honest, we all feel like that sometimes. 

When I was 10, I had major surgery on my intestines. The memories of prolonged periods in hospital stays and the massive scar on my tummy provoked this perception in me that the wound would heal, my body would manage without the part of my intestine that had been lost, and that I would always be different from before the operation. It’s a lot like a separation, where you also have to see how you manage and how you transition from what came before to what’s now to come whilst still carrying the whole story within you. I guess these thoughts triggered something within me. I’m the kind of person who observes a lot, watches people, studies them. And from this kind of observation – which is entirely interpersonal – comes this incredible fascination of mine. Ambivalence is what life is made of.

S: By creating these latex and leather suits, you’re producing a kind of ‘second skin’. To me, this seems very familiar. People often seem to want to wear such a thing so they can hide their injuries and weaknesses.

AB: Interesting. For the latex suits, I took a woman and a man and cut the contours of the skin to fit their body shapes exactly. The suits follow the codes of pattern making; except, when you’re in them, you can’t move any more. There’s no space to move an arm or sit down. Essentially, it’s a lifeless, empty skin.

S: Yes and no. I still had the sense there was something in it.

AB: You get the sense the suits had something in them at some point but that they’re now completely deflated. That’s the feeling I sometimes have. I made my first latex suits in 2015, in the context of the war in Syria and the wave of refugees that followed. That really played on my mind. The fact that we think things can be resolved rationally is truly horrifying. Take the situation on the Polish–Belarussian border at the moment. The value system of the EU is upheld and cited, but when it really comes down to putting [things] into practice, all too often we fail. In my installations, the ladders, especially, and the way the latex skins are positioned, are a reflection of my sense that, politically, we have totally lost our way. We know climbing faster and faster higher and higher up the ladder is not the solution.

S: I really understand your feelings on that. And it’s exactly what is motivating me to question and rethink my options and myself. I feel the issue isn’t going to let me go, and so, more and more, I expect myself to be active and alert.

AB: I totally understand that. I find it deeply disappointing to know that the government won’t fix it. At first, the narrative that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand seemed to be true. But we can see from the major crises of the last few years that we’ve given up on our democratic values. People want answers, and capitalism isn’t delivering them. And maybe that explains the fascination we’re constantly seeing for the individual. Wherever you look, people are creating their own individual, blinkered worlds. 

S: In your art, you break down the fear around showing things as they are. Is this related to your anger and speechlessness at the horrors of the world we live in today?

AB: Every work I create has to be sensed. And conversely, all my thoughts and feelings, my desperation and composure, also make their way into it.

S: The materials you use in your work are either things that you possess or have found or happened upon. Why is that?

AB: I always felt there was a hell of a lot of material around, and I didn’t want to add even more to it. I see my body – the human body – as the centre, and everything we find or that exists is tailored to us humans. A biker’s suit is difficult to stand up straight in because it’s made for a different position. And that’s what I find so interesting, along with the marks that become a part of it. Only later does a piece like that come to relate to a statement of some kind.

S: But that’s the magic of art, right?

AB: Absolutely.

S: Clothes and fashion are such important modes of communication. They are symbols of power, a language all to themselves, and that’s what they seem to be in your work, too.  

Ab: My fascination with bodies and my knowledge of them stems from my work in fashion. The proportions and movements of a body, [as well as] its counterpart, have become etched into me. I’m glad the question of attractiveness, which you find in fashion, no longer matters in my work today. The fact that I still focus on designing and marking-out second skins is a logical continuation of my life story. It’s a constant with a few outliers, if you like, and the core of it is the body.

S: The works that tackle injuries to the soul really do stir something deep within me. I found them to be an art of ‘opening up’. But then so do your works focussing on mechanical objects. In Eskalation (2016), a motorbike cut in two, for example, you reveal the bike’s internal workings, bringing the ‘inside outside’.

AB; Exactly. And that’s also why I designed [Trophy (2016)] in a way that the vagina and the opening remain visible. It was about getting the insides out and making them visible. I really do think that the operation I had when I was 10 brought the idea of insides into my consciousness. You wake up, see a scar and want to know what’s underneath it, but you can’t actually get visibly closer to it.

Alexandra Bircken ‘Fair Game’ is on at KINDL until 15 May 2022.