Adina Pintilie: You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body

The Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart is pleased to present the exhibition You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body by artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie. It marks the latest stage of her multi-platform research on the politics and poetics of intimacy and the body. Through different artistic languages and media—including installation, cinema, sculpture, and performance—her long-term, trans-disciplinary inquiry explores notions of how we relate to our own bodies and those of others. 

While contributing to the current conversations towards reassessing the normative in gender, sexuality, bodily ability and diversity, Pintilie’s distinctive perspective is conveyed through her singular visual cosmos and aesthetics as well as through a seductive rethinking of the power of the moving image and its politics of the gaze. Emerging from her personal experiences and nurtured by long-term collaboration with her protagonists, and by a collective experimentation informed by therapeutic and bodywork practices, the artist’s idiosyncratic methodology explores the central role of intimacy in everyday life.  

Pintilie’s research unfolds through an interconnected series of works, initiated with her feature film Touch Me Not—winner of the Golden Bear at the 2018 Berlinale and acclaimed worldwide for its boundary-pushing language and aesthetics—and continuing with the evolving project You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body, originally conceived for the Romanian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. 

The exhibition in Stuttgart, considerably rearranged and expanded for the Württembergischer Kunstverein, marks the project’s German premiere as well 
as its next stage, unveiling, for the first time, Pintilie’s new performative-cinematic installation Waffenstillstand (“Weapons Standing Still”). Within the premises of an exhibition space, the work reenacts the filmic apparatus situated at the core of Pintilie’s practice, the “alchemical space” in which reality and cinema merge and the moving images come into being. At the end of the exhibition, this new work will be activated through a two-and-a-half hour long live performance. Here, the main protagonists of You Are Another Me, together with Pintilie and her team, invite the audience to witness, and become participants in their filming process, referred to by the artist as the process of “emotional incubation”, exploring how temporality, memory, and history are inscribed in the body and inform experiences of intimacy.

Amidst the world-wide resurgence of normative ideologies as well as growing polarities between people and between belief systems, Pintilie reimagines a space of togetherness beyond borders and binaries, and places our connection to the bodies of others and to our own at the center of our personal and political lives. 

Events
Preview for the press: October 27, 11am
Exhibition opening: October 27, 7pm
Talk with the artist and the protagonists: October 28, 3–5pm
Peformance Waffenstillstand (“Weapons Standing Still”): January 11, 6:30–9pm
 

Protagonists: Hermann Müller, Dirk Lange, Laura Benson, Hanna Hofmann, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann
Curator: Viktor Neumann

Creative Producer: Bianca Oana

Exhibition design: Martin Backhaus, Hans D. Christ  
Post-Production Manager: Martin Backhaus

Director of Photography: George Chiper-Lillemark

Sound design: Manuel Grandpierre
 
Co-produced by Manekino Film and their partners Amerikafilm, Gaijin, KGP Filmproduktion, PINK.

Funded by
The Power of the Arts
Rudolf Augstein Stiftung
Wüstenrot Stiftung
LBBW Stiftung
Kulturamt der Stadt Stuttgart
Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg
ProLab

Tech partner
Eidotech

Media partner
Monopol—Magazin für Kunst und Leben

Thanks to
HKW Berlin