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Flower Play

Place: Clages, Cologne

Date: -

Photos by: Simon Vogel

Artists: Isabella Séville Fürnkäs

Works: How to Be a Flower, La matière qui rêve, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Process of Unlearning, Unpredictable Liars Revolt

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row”

– John McCrae

Isabella Séville Fürnkäs presents works from two new series in Flower Play: the large-scale nude drawings from the series The Process of Unlearning, which require visitors to look upward upon entering the space, and the drawings from the series How to Be a Flower, which extend throughout the subsequent rooms. Both series are united by a common central idea: they critically question the representation of women and deconstruct patriarchal power structures by first presenting the female body in its rawest, most natural form, before abstracting this body in the second series and embedding it within floral motifs. 

The shift from the naked, unmediated body to floral abstraction can be understood through a distinction that philosopher Judith Butler has explored for decades: that between sex and gender. Butler refers to the biological sex assigned at birth as “sex,” while “gender” denotes social gender — a construct whose supposed naturalness is produced only through repeated social “performances.” These two levels appear to stand alongside one another in Fürnkäs’ series. The drawings in The Process of Unlearning depict the body prior to any cultural attribution, directly and without embellishment. In How to Be a Flower, by contrast, it becomes visible how this body changes under the gaze of culture. It is overlaid with floral forms and translated into a visual language that has historically been imbued with femininity.

This floral visual language has a long history. The term Femme-fleur (literally, “flower woman”) emerged from nineteenth-century poetry and art criticism and was used to define an ideal of feminine beauty — a concept rooted in the centuries-old association between women and flowers. The term is politically charged because it implicitly rests on the assumption that feminine submissiveness is natural and an integral part of female identity — an image of the female body as purely decorative and aesthetically pleasing, yet ultimately devoid of substance. Fürnkäs distances herself precisely from this image, already ensuring upon entering the exhibition space that the viewer’s gaze is directed upward in order to look at representations of female bodies. But why, in the first place, is the flower read as feminine and alluring? Anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner explores this question in her essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” She argues that women are more strongly associated with nature because of their physical constitution — particularly their capacity to give birth — and that nature is regarded in virtually every culture as subordinate to the self. This closer connection to the “life of the species” reinforces social roles that are more resistant to cultural change, while men, without this biologically attributed responsibility, appear as carriers of cultural formation. Simone de Beauvoir develops this idea further on a bodily level: certain parts of the body, such as the breasts, acquire an actual function only through pregnancy. Before that, they appear primarily decorative.

The title of the exhibition itself also contains this idea of reversal. Flower Play can initially be read simply as a game or theatrical play, but when taken further, it can also be understood as an echo of power play — a term that acquires a particularly apt meaning in the consensual exchange of power and control between partners, for example in BDSM. Here, power is neither conquered nor imposed, but consciously shared and renegotiated. This very renegotiation of power — from a composition assigned to and structured around men toward one oriented toward the feminine — is the exhibition’s central concern.

– Text by Georg Papadopoulos

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