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

The exhibition You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body marks the latest stage of Adina Pintilie’s multi-platform research on the politics and poetics of intimacy and the body. Through different artistic languages and mediums—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 re-arranged and extended for the WKV, marks the project’s German premiere as well as its next stage, unveiling, for the first time, Pintilie’s new performative-cinematic installation. 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, according to the artist, reality and cinema merge and the moving images come into being, exploring how temporality, memory, and history are inscribed in the body and inform experiences of intimacy.

At the end of the exhibition, this new work will be activated through a two-and-a-half hour long live performance. Here, the 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’.

You Are Another Me is part of an exhibition series that has been dedicated to feminist and queer intersectional approaches in art, film, activism, and research since 2007 with artists such as Anna Oppermann, Teresa Burger, Peggy Buth, Sergio Zevallos, Ines Doujak, Imogen Stidworthy, Lorenza Böttner, Carrie Mae Weems, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Delphine Seyrig, and Adina Pintilie.

NOTE

Recommended Age: 16+
The exhibition is not recommended for visitors under 16 years of age who are not accompanied by adults. Among other things, it contains explicit nudity and consensual sexual acts.

Warning for Visitors with Photosensitive Epilepsy
Strobe lights and other bright, flickering lights in some of the exhibition's video sequences may trigger epileptic seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.