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Artist: Puppies Puppies

curated by Anna Roberta Goetz / Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo

"Love is expressed through care, responsibility, respect, knowledge, and trust. It is something we do: a commitment to the wellbeing of ourselves and others." (1)

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, widely known as Puppies Puppies, engages this year's curated by theme LOVE through bell hooks' understanding of love as a practice rather than an emotion. This conception of love has long informed the installation and performance artist's Gesamtkunstwerk-like approach. She has repeatedly introduced actionable and participatory elements into her exhibitions, using the platform afforded to her as an artist to provide forms of care and practical support for people whose wellbeing is not adequately served by public infrastructures-including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color. Her exhibitions have, for example, incorporated a public shower as well as an HIV testing and counselling room. In this way, her work proposes care for one another, and particularly for one's community, as both a responsibility and a source of collective strength.

Within Puppies Puppies' oeuvre, ordinary and found objects often become charged with personal, social, and political meaning. Working across sculpture, installation, and performance, she brings questions of identity, power, embodiment, and lived experience into the exhibition space, exploring how personal experience can become a site of collective reflection.

Clothes (Kleidung) takes clothing as its point of departure. They are intimate and public at once: they touch and protect the body, conceal and expose it, shape its appearance, and communicate how a person wishes to be seen. They carry traces of bodies and lives, becoming repositories of memory, identity, vulnerability, desire, and care.

For Clothes (Kleidung), Puppies Puppies presents exclusively newly commissioned works. Clothing Drive (for Trans, Queer, GNC and 2S+ people) (2026) takes the form of a social sculpture that accumulates donated clothes while simultaneously allowing members of the trans community to take them free of charge, continually dispersing and re-forming the work. Venus of the Rags (Transitioned) (2026), meanwhile, appropriates and transitions an art-historical icon: Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags (1967). Here, Venus, an iconic motif of the Western art canon, takes the form of the artist's own body, while clothes she no longer wears become the rags. Bringing together two bodies and several moments in time, the work suggests transformation not as a rejection of the past, but as a way of carrying it forward.

Together, the works understand clothes as more than objects. They touch and protect the body, carry traces of past selves, communicate identity, and move between people. They hold memory while also enabling change. This understanding of clothing connects directly to bell hooks' conception of love as an active practice. To care is to act; to recognise another person's needs is to take responsibility for their wellbeing. In Clothes (Kleidung), love therefore becomes material: it is found in what is remembered, reclaimed, shared, given away, and made available to another.

Text: Anna Roberta Goetz

(1) bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000).

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)