Shows

DWELLING

Place: FLUX, Zurich

Date: -

Invited by: Nadja von Ah

Artists: Magdalena Baranya & Giulia Hess, Dominique Feusi, Isabella Séville Fürnkäs, Anna Johnston, Saso Roy, Monika Schori

Curated by: International Woman’s Month

Works: Interiorities, L'Origine du monde / The Womb

Isabella Fürnkäs (*1988 in Tokyo) is a French-German artist who works in a variety of media. The body of work involves equal shares of video, multimedia installation, performance and drawing. Her work was exhibited at ART SINGAPORE, SGP (2026); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2023); Museum Folkwang, Essen, (2022); Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2019); Kunsthalle Wien (2018); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016). Her work represented in the Burger Collection Zurich/Hong Kong and the Philara Collection Düsseldorf, amongst others. Since 2023 she is a lecturer at Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Braunschweig. 

The two presented work series are L’Origine du monde and dazwischen (the book about the body). dazwischen (the book about the body) is a series of drawings that hang lightly from a clothesline, traversing the exhibition space in rows – like linen sheets hung out to dry. In fact, it also brings to mind the idiom „airing out one’s dirty laundry“: The works depict female nudes rendered in pencil and washed with coffee tones, where bodies emerge through suggestion and detail. Soft lines and diluted stains blur the borders between presence and memory, turning each figure into a moment of quiet self-observation. Together, the pieces feel like pages from an intimate visual diary, exploring femininity as something felt from within rather than merely seen. 

The work L’Origine du monde shows explicit pencil drawings of three detailed female genitalia, framed within a plexiglass block. Although the drawings are passport-photo sized, they have an intensity that pulls the viewer’s gaze inward. Installed on the wall at the height of Isabella’s own vagina, with cushions placed on the floor, the setup forces the viewer either to bend forward or to kneel in front of the work. The images appear almost to cry out, asserting self-determination and a disruptive visual power that transforms the encounter into something resembling an act of reverence. You stand humbly before her, on your knees as if in prayer to a goddess. In this positioning, the vagina is venerated like a goddess, granted the devotion and dignity that have long been denied.


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