Studien der Übungen

2025, video installation, currently consisting of five video loops

Installed for the exhibition Nah am Wasser | Ob vodi

The installation examines how physical culture shapes and constrains the body, from nationalist gymnastics and modern fitness rituals to the subtle regimes of self-optimization. Yet repetition also becomes a site of refusal: gestures slip, slow, exaggerate, falter, become absurd. The body resists its own choreography, queering ideals of strength, purity and control.

Installed within sight of a landscape long associated with ideals of discipline, vitality and national identity, the work echoes the lingering histories inscribed in its surroundings. The traces of order, conformity and control persist not only in memory, but in the quiet aesthetic of space, posture and repetition.

Presented across multiple screens, the sequences form a dispersed choreography of exhaustion and persistence. Their differing tempos and durations unsettle the room’s calmness, suggesting not one body but many, not one time but several. In this accumulation of effort and collapse, the work asks what remains when repetition no longer produces progress — when movement itself becomes a form of resistance, endurance, and care.

Camera: Philipp Hoelzgen, Kevin Chao, Michail Michailov