Sophia Mainka

Critical text

Sophia Mainka (b. 1990, Munich) works with various media such as drawing, sculpture, and video, which she usually combines in expansive installations. Her work engages with philosophical discourses and current social trends, as well as artistic research and production in an analysis of a middle-class aesthetic. Doing so, the artist raises questions that the structure and reality of life in a supposedly posthuman age inevitably raise. Relationships between human beings and objects are called into play, as is the movement of the body. She abstracts, enlarges, reduces, manipulates everyday objects, playing with interpretations and reinterpretations.

Text by Saim Demircan, Maurin Dietrich

The artist’s voice

I examine the relationship between people, things, and other forms of life. My sculptures are reminiscent of familiar objects, but deny their function, like Bartleby the Scrivener. On closer inspection, they seem neither familiar nor trustworthy.