Show me your Blaschko | Ștefania Iakab & Ana Messer

Ștefania Iakab and Ana Messer work individually, but their practices occasionally intersect, sharing a common interest in using atypical materials to create sculptural structures that evoke various surfaces and textures (natural or synthetic fur, feathers, grass). Ana is interested in how emotional trauma translates into physical form and the somatization of inner feelings. Recently, her main focus has been the human body with its beauty and imperfections. Ștefania explores the relationship between human and non-human beings, between natural/organic and synthetic/industrial.

The collaborative project Show me your Blaschko began with an understanding of epithelial tissue as a surface whose appearance is determined by its own internal mechanisms that regulate its function and appearance, but at the same time, external factors can disrupt the rules. Blaschko lines (named after the German dermatologist Alfred Blaschko) appear on the human skin in the form of highly pigmented curves or zigzags. Just like animal fur patterns, human skin also follows its own patterns that only emerge in rare cases.

The two artists proposed a performative intervention in which the texture of the epidermis was recomposed from fragments of animal and plant origin and then transposed into a video projection. The audience was invited to intervene to break the rhythm of applying the fragments as originally set. The epidermis of the hybrid being was the result of a controlled process, but also of free and spontaneous interventions. 

Curator: Maria Orosan-Telea

*The action was a temporary insert in the Hyperesthesia exhibition of the Avantpost group.