Sonja Yakovleva

Solo Exhibition:
Sonja Yakovleva
Tanga Tanga!
Robert Grunenberg
22.04.2022 – 04.062022

Sonja Yakovleva’s work questions the ideology behind material value and social inequality. Located on the boundary between art and handicraft, she shows paper cuttings of alternative realities that often depict female protagonists. Yakovleva stresses that her choice of material is considered more feminine than it should be – in reality, it is rare that a handcraft is dominated by women. Yet in terms of content, her work is full of revealing observations of patriarchal structures and heteronormative power relations.

The Frankfurt-based artist confronts these moments of absence as a point of transition between a view from nowhere and an imagined feminine retrospective. Glorious histories, uncelebrated celebrations, kitsch epic poems, and female struggles become motives of a study of the unstated, the unseen, and the placeless. In Yakovleva’s images, femininity manifests itself beyond its figurative and representational depictions and appears as a functional principle of creative negativity.