Becoming a Body of Others
Since 1 May, the interdisciplinary installation artist Linda Marwan, who lives in Leipzig, has been working as a scholarship holder of the Landesverband Lippe at the Künstlerhaus in Schwalenberg. From 4 October to 1 November, her works will be on view in a closing exhibition at the Robert Koepke Haus.
In Schwalenberg, Linda Marwan continued and expanded her project Becoming a Body of Others. This project playfully engages with the history and concept of the monster, creating sculptures that appear as hybrid creatures, referencing the empathic network connecting all living beings. In awareness of this interconnectedness, the work searches for a way to avert ecological catastrophe.
Linda Marwan’s works are influenced by gaming as well as the fantasy and horror genres, exploring questions of aesthetic and conceptual characteristics. They depict hybrid creatures combining human, animal, monster and plant. To create them, she largely uses 3D modelling and 3D printing. In some of these sculptures, the printed and hand-crafted parts ultimately merge into a seemingly homogeneous body.
In this way, she creates a world of hybrid creatures that may at first appear strange or even unsettling, yet are nonetheless immediately fascinating. Drawing on legends and myths, Marwan’s creatures connect human and animal, as well as landscape with the bodies that inhabit it. In doing so, they explore corporeality from the perspective of openness and self-surrender.
These monsters act as manifestations of the fear of one’s own dissolution into the alien. At the same time, they speak of having forgotten that everything is interwoven, that everything depends on everything else, and that one’s own life can only endure within a world that is, in turn, allowed to live. The appearance of monsters goes hand in hand with the world becoming inhospitable.
The result is creatures that unsettle us through human features and details we associate with threat or pain: the sculpture “Orca Larva (the Baby)” (2025), a whale-like infant with sharp teeth, which the artist nurses at her own breast, or the sculpture “Totfund” (“Dead Find”, 2026), which appears as a cross between a whale and a reptile, with sharp teeth and human-looking, claw-like fingernails.
For the Koepke Haus, Linda Marwan developed an installation featuring “Imp-Babies”. The imp, a goblin-like creature, emerges from an extracorporeal placenta. Three imps are in the process of being severed from the umbilical cord. They lie or sit on sections of placenta located outside a body, lending the process of birth an alien, monstrous, slightly unsettling quality.
The exhibition at the Robert Koepke Haus presents the works created during her time in Schwalenberg, alongside a number of earlier ensembles.
https://www.kulturagentur-online.de/linda-marwan-offenes-atelier-im-kuenstlerhaus/
Images:
Linda Marwan, Orca Larva (The Baby), 2025, PLA, oil paint, cushion, magnets, textile
87 × 55 × 40 cm, Photo: Linda Marwan (detail)
Linda Marwan, Totfund [Dead Find], 2026, PLA, wire, plaster, epoxy, acrylic paint, varnish, 210 × 35 × 40 cm. “Sand und Salz – Islands Found and Lost”, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven 2026; Photo: Edward Greiner
