Kasper Bosmans, Lena Henke, Win McCarthy, Annelies Planteijdt and Diane Simpson each navigate through the urban landscape in their own way, but they all investigate similar issues: how can our environment be mapped? To what extent are the body and psyche subject to this environment? And can the body and the city influence each other?
Lena Henke (Germany, 1982) expands the range of meaning of traditional sculpture by incorporating questions of femaleness and the production of power relations in urban space. In doing so, she not only engages the myth of masculinity; she also works with the strands of historical tradition—the questions of pedestal and space—to interrogate the logic of sculptural representation and representability. She holds the reins with great self-assurance, controlling the representation of women's bodies and its intervening in the mechanisms of urban architecture. It is Henke’s far-reaching reflections on the capacity of the sculptural that enable her, conversely, to grasp urbanity as a historically evolved sculpture, whose social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion can be altered and redefined by means of targeted interventions.
