KRAFT AKTE

TAKING SPACE IS A FEMINIST ACT

Performance by Nicola Kötterl, Eléonore Bovet, Wiebke Dobers.
As part of 48 Stunden Neukölln, a 15-minute performance will take place on Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 2pm, 4pm and 6pm at Galerie im Saalbau.

In the Performance Kraft Akte, cultural codings of masculinity are explored. Their point of departure is poses from ancient sculptures, whose idealized visual language continues through Western cultural history into contemporary media. Pop culture, fitness aesthetics and high power posing appear as current expressions of this tradition, particularly as they are staged within social media and self-optimization contexts. The performers draw on a transhistorical archive of male-coded postures and gestures, translating them into a physical vocabulary that exposes the aesthetic, social, and political layers embedded in these forms. Through reenactment, exaggeration, and fragmentation, a movement repertoire emerges that oscillates between irony and seriousness, appropriation and analysis.

In her works, Nicola Kötterl critically examines the representation, construction and instrumentalization of body images and investigates the ideological meanings of idealized body representations. Her performances often take place in historical buildings with a National Socialist past. The architecture of German fascism is monumental, loud and straightforward. It was intended to embody power, superiority and strength and to impress and intimidate the population. With the same intention, National Socialist propaganda art made use of the aesthetics of ancient Greek statues.
Kötterl uses these contexts to deconstruct images of the body that have been shaped by architecture and art history as representations of power and masculinity and continue to have an impact today. Ancient statues and athletic poses are examined gesturally, abstracted and refracted through modern staging techniques.