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Magic

Sarah Schoenfeld has been in my saved folder for quite some time, and I’m excited to finally share some of her incredible work with you in this edition of Funga.

Sarah is a Berlin-based artist who studied fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work explores alternative modes of knowledge and healing by creating interdisciplinary “laboratories” that combine “science, mythology, religion, magic, and technology.” Through installations, performances, sculptures, and photographs, Schoenfeld investigates the limitations of Western-liberal perspectives on global issues. Her art has been featured in prominent exhibitions, including the Berghain/Boros Collection, Strasbourg Biennale, and MAK Vienna/Vienna Biennale.

 

 

Hero´s Journey 

While researching Sarah, I discovered her piece Hero’s Journey, which I found truly fascinating. The title immediately stood out to me because it refers to Joseph Campbell’s classic concept, The Hero’s Journey. The artwork seems to draw a connection between personal transformation and the collective experience of the nightclub.

“The piece Hero’s Journey consists of two parts. For Hero’s Journey (Lamp), over a period of ten weeks, club goers were invited to participate in the sculpture by contributing their piss, which I then collected in order to have a fluid archeology of a collective ecstasy. I put 1,000 liters of this liquid in a glass vitrine, like you would have presented documents in a museum, but here this is just liquid. It’s lit from both sides and the gradient looks almost like a sunset: from bright yellow on the side to almost black in the middle. Here the liquid still carries the traces of the substances which chemically cause the ecstasy and have been washed out from inside the bodies. It is something very intimate. Hero’s Journey (Towels) is the second piece. The “towels” are several long velour hangings. The white velour fabric is interrupted with horizontal strips of purple. The sweaty “nighthawk pilgrims” were invited to wipe their sweat with a velour fabric that was treated with the chemical Ninhydrin, a substance used by criminologists to discover traces of human contact in a crime scene. The resulting purple tones are outlines of the bodies’ points of contact.”

 

Hero’s Journey (Lamp), 2014, steel, glasvitrine, urine, light

 

Hero’s Journey (Towels), 2014 sweat, ninhydrin, velour
installation view at Berghain, Berlin

 

All You Can Feel

“What might the effect of a drug look like?”

That was the question asked by artist Sarah Schoenfeld who had much exposure to the realities of drugs while working at Berghain – a legendary Berlin nightclub. To answer the question she converted her photography studio into a laboratory and exposed legal and illegal liquid drug mixtures to film negatives. The resulting chemical reactions were then greatly magnified into large prints to form a body of work titled All You Can Feel.

Her images—featuring substances like heroin, cocaine, and MDMA—merge elements of photography, alchemy, and psychology and offers an interesting way to think about the hidden aspects of drug experiences.

You can read an interview with Sarah Schoenfeld about All You Can Feel here.

 

All you can feel: Speed + Magic, amphetamine on photonegative, enlarged

 

“I think it has big potential and is a challenge to use drugs outside the sacral and non-religious context. Therefore I am trying to unveil the moral settings on drugs. Drugs have been criminalized by politics and therefore I try to find a way of showing them outside of this moralistic context. My attempt is to create something seductive about it, to use them in an aesthetic context. Also I love to play with alchemistic vocabulary. I am looking for a certain knowledge which is not connected to the natural sciences, but the philosophical, political, aesthetic or mystical.”

 

Adrenalin

 

Caffeine

 

Cocaine

 

Ketamin

 

Ketamin

 

Heroin

 

Orphiril

 

Ecstasy

 

Speed

 

LSD

 

 

Crystal Meth

 

Magic

 

Valium