“Heavy Dancer” is part of the “Shapeshifters Dance” series, which emerged from an exploration of fixed processes and structures. The starting point is the question of what happens when change is allowed within crystalline systems. The series transfers forms—originating in painting—onto various materials using stencils. Qualities such as stability, fragility, or heaviness become fluid; they change depending on the context in which an element appears. What is strength if it is not based on the absence of vulnerability, but rather arises from the combination of opposing qualities? The figure of Heavy Dancer is cast from blue-stained concrete. Its strictly geometric form, reminiscent of Brutalist architecture, takes on an unexpectedly delicate, almost animal-like presence in nature. Two additional elements extend this materiality further into the space. Suspended in mid-air, they liberate the concrete from its expected heaviness and lend it a sense of lightness. In the Spotlight Project Space, the relationship between the three elements becomes spatial poetry: crystalline heaviness becomes mobile, and a seemingly solid form begins to dance.
Nina Gospodin (born 1984 in Hamburg) is an artist based in Vienna. Starting with large-format watercolors, she develops objects, installations, and collaborative formats through which she explores how freedom can be experienced within structures.
Her work stems from the observation that the conditions of freedom today are increasingly negotiated on a structural and algorithmic level. Her works seek to identify where freedom can be experienced materially and sensually within structures.
Gospodin works with a form-DNA she developed herself and a modular stencil system. Her works often begin with established orders that are materially transformed during the process, giving rise to new roles and relationships among their elements.
Her works have been exhibited internationally in galleries, universities, and institutional contexts, including in Vienna, Cologne, Cambridge, Chicago, New York City, Melbourne, as well as at Villa Soriano and Dolores in Uruguay. She has been an artist-in-residence at Art Circle Wolfgangsee, the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Berlin Art Institute, and barac Mannheim, and is a founding member of the international I Found U Collective.
