Martina Stapf uses the self-image as a critical artistic practice to explore identity concepts. In her staged photographs – captured on analogue film – she deals with the body as a medium. The movements in the photographs are imaging and intuitive. Together with different fabrics nestled around the female body, they create a symbiosis of material and substance. The body becomes a projection surface, opening up certain association that want to hide the female body as a potential source of pleasure, but also leaves space for interpretation. The artist addresses the problematic relationship between appearance and identity, as well as the body codes that are firmly anchored in the cultural space in which we are embedded.

Martina Stapf (*1990 in Eisenstadt) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Dorit Magreiter and lives and works in Vienna.

[text Sophie Haslinger]