Barbara Kapusta: The Giant Event

Gianni Manhattan is pleased to present The Giant, Barbara Kapusta’s first solo show with the gallery.

“She comes into focus, percentages of her body and details appear. Wonderfully creepy: a mouth, a toe, a fingernail.
She moves her gigantic body, and it is effortless. She is many bodies. “I am a multitude,” we hear her say.

You may ask yourself if she is public, infinite, and natural? Should you speak of her as a plurality? Are they political, local, all over the place? Are they connected, swarm-like, a unity?

Her body calls into question the concepts of your exceptionalism, our singularity, your meaning, your imperialism, our superiority, and our sanity. They are not magical, or religious. She is not sacred but secular. She is hyperactive and hyper-real like spiders, like flies. Is she viral?

“You know,” she says, and her voice roars loud and noisy: “I might be speaking even when you cannot hear me. I make myself clear without you understanding me.”

– Excerpt from Barbara Kapusta, The Giant

Barbara Kapusta, born in 1983, lives and works in Vienna. Selected recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Blazing World, MUMOK cinema, Vienna; We Make the Place by Playing, VIS, Hamburg; Vice Versa: Our Earth is Their Moon, Our Moon is their Earth, festival of art in public space, Prague, curated by Significant Other; Empathic Creatures, Ashley, Berlin (2018); Instructions for Happiness, 21er Haus, Vienna; The 8 and the Fist, KW Berlin; In Middens, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2017), The Promise of Total Automation, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016).

Barbara Kapusta’s work is part of the following collections: MUMOK Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Fotosammlung des Bundes Vienna, Landessammlung Niederösterreich.