JESSIKA DIRKS,
BASED IN HANOVER, G

I explore the fractures between body, humanity and the world.

 

My artistic practice stems from a longing for authenticity – not as a claim, but as a state that can only arise through process, through opening up, through revelation. My works resist the commodification and reification of being. They seek spaces of experience beyond hierarchical order, beyond unambiguous attribution, beyond a gaze that divides, categorises and controls.

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The starting point for my work was my own bodily experience as a projection screen for patriarchal power relations. In my exploration of shame, guilt and circumcision, the body became an archive: for individual wounds as well as for collective inscriptions. Consequently, my focus shifted increasingly to the self – to the question of what lies beyond these attributions. What remains when the frameworks of gender, role, function and evaluation lose their validity? And who or what can the subject then be?

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In this process, the self did not begin to stabilise, but rather to dissolve – or, to put it another way: to open up without disappearing. Since then, my work has existed in a state of limbo: between dissolution and manifestation, between analysis and surrender, between critical self-examination and a longing for rootedness. I do not view this movement as regression or escapism, but as a necessary counter-movement to a technologised, patriarchal world that increasingly alienates people from their own physicality, cyclical nature and connection to nature.

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In my work, femininity appears not as an ascribed identity, but as an origin, a primordial soup, a principle of becoming. It stands for the cyclical, the processual, the non-linear – for a form of knowledge that does not dominate, but sustains. This perspective challenges the Western, male-dominated Enlightenment, which elevated reason, utility and control to the highest authority, thereby systematically excluding other forms of knowledge. I regard the separation of humanity and nature, of body and mind, of subject and world as a historical exception – with consequences that remain effective to this day.

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My works respond to this alienation not with explanation or accusation, but with openness. Through painting, multimedia works, text, sound and installation, spaces are created that engage all the senses. They are not unambiguous, nor can they be interpreted definitively. Truth is not conveyed here, but experienced – as a hunch, as a sense of unease, as a quiet recognition. The confrontational nature that some viewers encounter lies not in the intention of my work, but in the radical nature of making visible what has long been repressed.

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My artistic practice is not an act of provocation for its own sake. It is a gently radical unveiling. A process that embraces failure, that promises no definitive answers, and yet refuses to accept the existing conditions as inevitable. I see my work as an invitation: to pause, to feel, to unlearn dominant images – and to cautiously approach a way of being that is not optimised, but connected.