BERLIN.- The exhibition Action Bodies continues the artistic-curatorial exploration of the ifa art collection with a focus on how spaces and bodies are perceived and shaped through movement and collective action. Selected artworks from the ifa collection are presented alongside contemporary perspectives, illuminating social orders and opening up possibilities for resistance. In this space of co-existence, textile objects, hybrid bodies and social choreographies gradually unfold.

Franz Erhard Walther has been creating interactive textile sculptures since the early 1960s, declaring action an art form in itself and turning viewers into key actors. An important source of inspiration for this exhibition is his “action bodies”, which intertwine object and process, individuals and groups, elements of separation and connection. The hand thinks and the body responds. Abstract sculptural terms such as (bodily) measurement, energy, space and time suddenly become accessible.

In her cinematic homage to dancer, choreographer and textile artist Noa Eshkol, Sharon Lockhart explores movement as a form of language, and how dance emerges from within it.

Hana Miletić’s hand-woven textiles are interpretations of repairs the artist encounters in public spaces. Her methodology contrasts the fast-paced standardisation of the present with a material and care-based form of labour.

Together with a group of schoolchildren, Eglė Budvytytė explores the act of communal shaking with the aim of disrupting established structures in the school system and helping students perceive their bodies as spaces of agency and resistance.

In Silvi Na�i’s Handfilm, invisible pain becomes an archive of gestures and bodies with a gravity of their own. It evolves from an experience of personal limitation towards action and togetherness.

Tales Frey’s performance unfolds between dance, sculpture and clothing, combining closeness and distance, freedom and limitation, balance and transformation into a shared body that explores and reimagines the space between people.

The body is a house, and it is home to the soul. Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax House opens up such interior worlds. The concentrated adjacency of enduring and transient elements unfolds the liminal spaces where we reside.

Artists: Egl� Budvytyt�, Tales Frey, Wolfgang Laib, Sharon Lockhart, Hana Miletić, Silvi Na�i, Franz Erhard Walther