Alexandra Bircken’s practice is built around the human form. Her works incorporate an unusual range of materials, from manufactured items such as silicon, nylon tights, weapons, and machinery, to organic materials including wool, leather, branches, and dried fruit. Stripped of their former purpose, these are assembled into extraordinary and uncomfortable arrangements, each work alive with opposing tensions.
In the Arsenale the artists exhibits the visceral, apocalyptic and dynamic installation ESKALATION (2016), a dystopian view of what the end of humanity might look like.
In the Central Pavilion, Bircken presents six works that interweave themes of gender, power and vulnerability, animal and machine. These are works that recall our vulnerability, our physicality, and the hubristic tools we create to protect ourselves from the outside and from each other.
