Luzia Cruz, Hände waschen nicht vergessen, 2025, Courtesy the artist
Whisper Down the Lane –
Luzia Cruz
1 May – 3 August 2025
Kunsthaus foyer
Luzia Cruz constructs immersive, site-specific environments that poetically disrupt mechanisms of power. In the context of the exhibition series Whisper Down the Lane, she presents her new installation Händewaschen nicht vergessen (Engl. Do not forget to wash your hands) (2025). The site-specific, wall spanning installation uses the Kunsthaus foyer as a place where boundaries become blurred to provoke reflections on the dualities of play and destruction, healing and harm. At the centre is a brightly coloured, enlarged image of a dart-poison frog. Chemicals from its skin are used to produce a pain killer that is more potent than morphine yet dangerously close to a lethal substance. This ambiguity extends into the artist’s use of plastic seats, modeled after toy gun bullets and genetically modified organisms – bright orange and mass-produced. Fiction and play become entry points into broader questions relating to how symbols of economic, cultural and technological power shape collective memory and political narratives tied to comfort and happiness.
In the experimental and communicative exhibition format Whisper Down the Lane, the roles and functions of hosting and being hosted become fluid: in line with the eponymous children’s game, the exhibiting artists themselves choose the next person. With the project, the Kunsthaus transfers part of the curatorial responsibility to the artists themselves, with the aim of creating alternative institutional modes of access and rendering local network structures visible both in terms of personal ties and with regard to artistic approaches. So far, works by Jaewon Kim, Fritz Lehmann, Altay Tuz and Pia Pospischil have been shown as part of Whisper Down the Lane.
Luzia Cruz‘s (*1997) artistic practice spans multiple media, including sculpture, drawing, sound installation and video to create multi-layered works that reflect on themes such as necropolitics, comfort, failure, desire, productivity and guilt. She has held several scholarships, among them the artistic production grant from the Luso-American Development Foundation (2025) and the study grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2022-24). Her recent and upcoming exhibitions include Kunstraum Botschaft, Berlin (2024), Vorfluter, Berlin (2025) and Mono, Lisbon (2025). She lives and works in Hamburg.
Thu, 1 May 2025, 6–10 pm
Opening
in the context of Panorama XII with CILIA & Defetro