Artists: Ja Jess - Andrea Marcellier

Bruiseless is a state of collision that leaves no superficial marks on the skin. Yet it hints towards impact. Both in Ja Jess’ still lifes of an egg donation and in Andrea Marcellier’s masturbatory sculptures, a touch reaches inside. Something is taken that remains unseen, like the genetic records of bodies, or the annihilating nature of one’s own fantasies. And something is given. A touch can mean the beginning of a new life, or the soon-ending pleasure of fingers moving back and forth.

Conversation (16h51)
: A friend told me
: that when someone builds a house there was a saying — if people didnt like the people buying the house or next subrenters — they would take eggs and nest make a hole in the wall and nest them there — than they would close the wall
: and it would start smelling after some time
: and the people wouldnt know
: where this smell comes from

: thats quite the curse

Andrea Marcellier (b.1995, Paris) is a French-Venezuelan artist based in Paris. Her works explore the gesture as a site of intimacy, what can and cannot be touched. Flowers are used for vandalism, ornate weapons dress a piece of meat. The tools of oppression are adorned until they become beautiful, and beauty operates as a lure to unbury collective silences and desires. The work traces where taming and tenderness share a single threshold. Andrea Marcellier studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and holds a degree in psychology. She has shown internationally in New York, Hangzhou, and Berlin, and with galleries such as DS Galerie (Paris) and Belmacz (London). She was a resident at the Villa Belleville, Paris.

Ja Jess (b.1998, Dusseldorf) understands their performativity as an artist as social drag-characters. As gestalt giving glitches between physical presence and future ancestors. Ja Jess writes corporeal compositions where voice becomes the oscillating superimposition of bodies, and anatomy a collective fleshly archive passed on as a prosthetic touch into the stratigraphy of social architectures. By entering such mystified roles in the theatricality of societal contexts — like Doll a stripper; Jane Doe a mortician; Fetus a worker on an archaeological excavation site; or Zoe an egg-cell donor — social drag becomes a phenomenological approach for examining how biopolitical norms migrate through bodies. Their works have been shown i.a. at the K21 of the Kunstsammlung NRW, Pageant in New York City, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Fridericianum at Documenta 15 or the Sanshang Contemporary Art Museum in Hangzhou as well as in galleries including Kadel Willborn (Dusseldorf) and Belmacz (London). They were a fellow in the NRW+ residency program at the Kunsthalle Münster.