Becoming a Body of Others
The installation artist Linda Marwan, based in Leipzig, is coming to Schwalenberg as the new grant recipient. Her works feature hybrid creatures combining human, animal, monster, and plant elements.
Starting May 1, 2026, the new grant recipient of the Landesverband Lippe will move into the artist’s house in Schwalenberg for six months, working toward a final exhibition in October at the Robert Koepke Haus.
The jury — consisting of Landesverband chairman Jörg Düning-Gast, head of the Kulturagentur Jochen Brunsiek, art advisor/art historian Dr. Mayarí Granados, art historian Vera Scheef, Schieder-Schwalenberg’s mayor Marco Müllers, Prof. Andreas Beaugrand, André Köller (Phoenix Contact), Prof. Ernst Thevis (artist), and Axel Plöger (artist) — selected Leipzig-based artist Linda Marwan from over seventy applications from Germany and abroad.
Linda Marwan is an interdisciplinary installation artist working with sculpture, painting, and digital media to create concentrated ensembles in which animals, plants, hybrid creatures, and the human body develop symbiotic relationships. Influenced by gaming, fantasy, and horror genres, she analyzes and recombines aesthetic and narrative elements, focusing on how aesthetic qualities create atmosphere. Her work explores the body as a space of experience and its relationship to environment, digital, and imaginary spaces.
For her time in Schwalenberg, Marwan plans to continue and expand her project Becoming a Body of Others, which explores the history and concept of the monster to create hybrid sculptures referencing the empathic network of living beings — a network whose awareness may hold solutions to ecological catastrophe. She primarily uses 3D modeling and 3D printing with sustainable materials in dialogue with classical sculptural techniques.
The resulting creatures, drawing on myths and legends, connect humans with animals and landscapes with the bodies that inhabit them. These monsters act as manifestations of the fear of dissolving into the unfamiliar, while also speaking to a forgotten truth: that everything is interconnected and life can only persist in a world that is itself allowed to live.
Marwan’s project proposes a new ecology in which neither nature nor humans, but hybrid forms of human and non-human beings, appear as decision-makers — an experimental metaphysics aimed at a new balance of power between nature and culture.
Biography: Linda Marwan (*1989) studied at the HBK Braunschweig and HGB Leipzig, graduating in 2019. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Fresh A.I.R. grant (2025), a residency grant from Kunstverein Röderhof (2020), and a grant for digital mediation formats from the Deutscher Künstlerbund (2022). She lives and works in Leipzig.
Info: Schwalenberg Grant for Visual Arts, May 1 – October 31, 2026. Final exhibition: October 4 – November 1, 2026, Robert Koepke Haus.
Contact: Dr. Mayarí Granados, Lippische Kulturagentur m.granados@landesverband-lippe.de
Image: Linda Marwan in the exhibition I am Flux, Stiftung Berliner Leben. Berlin. 2025 © Photo: Galya Feierman
