Mystic Muscles

Tina Kohlmann – Mystic Muscles Tina Kohlmann's artistic practice draws from experimental and research-oriented contexts. In her oeuvre, the artist engages with fringe sciences, mythology, anthropology, and ritual aesthetics. Kohlmann is particularly interested in phenomena of transition: states between visibility and invisibility, rationality and speculation, as well as practices in which bodies and materials function as mediators between different levels of reality. In her works, she employs diverse organic and artificial materials such as gemstones, minerals, plants, synthetic hair, resin, and plastic. Her sculptures simultaneously evoke ethnological objects from an exotic culture, specimens from a laboratory, and fictional artifacts from an imagined parallel world. The deliberate combination of opposing materials – natural stone meets synthetic fabrics, minerals meet industrial products – creates tensions that undermine established scientific ordering systems. Gemstones take on a particular role in this context: they partly carry a protective function and are hidden within the sculptures. Like small, concealed switching points, they almost seem like buttons to another portal, as if they could activate a transition to another level of reality. Kohlmann's experimental approach to different materials and her great interest in spirituality, folklore, and ethnology are additionally shaped by numerous travels and stays abroad through fellowships and artist residencies. Particularly the mythologies of northern European countries such as Norway, Iceland, and Finland inform her sculptures. Many of the exhibited masks and figures bear names that reference media, historical personalities, or fictional characters. They function as projection surfaces for narratives between documentation and imagination, between spiritual invocation and pop-cultural reference. In this interweaving of the archaic, ethnological, and sci-fi, Kohlmann develops her own mythology – a poetic archive of possible pasts and speculative futures. In the sculpture Xenoglossy, the tongue describes the alleged ability to speak a foreign language without having learned it. This phenomenon is reported in religious and esoteric contexts; it is also claimed that xenoglossy can occur under hypnosis. These figures frequently oscillate between protective and guardian figures, ancestral images, or spiritualist mediums, pointing to the human desire for orientation in uncertain times. Symbols and figures from mythology, such as the snake as an ambivalent being, can be identified in her sculptures. In the work Glycon, a snake winds through a skull. The so-called Glykon snake is a mythical creature from Greek mythology and became a cult object of the Asclepius cult in ancient southern and southeastern Europe. At the same time, some of the sculptures deliberately break with the closure of archaic figures. They have openings, appear like vessels, and are equipped with plants. In this permeability and vitality, they formulate a counter-design to the monumental, static sculptural tradition: they are not merely image carriers but potential habitats that can change, grow, and transform. The exhibition space thus becomes a transformative transitional space between present, past, reality, and fiction. Light, reflections, and surfaces play a central role: they actively incorporate the bodies of the visitors and allow space and work to continually merge into one another. For the former Blumen Corso, which also functions as the festival center of the project, Kohlmann develops a site-specific installation of masks, figures, and artifacts that references the history of the landmark building. As a public place, the space is consciously conceived as permeable not only because of its glass materiality – as an interface between inside and outside, art and urban space, individual perception and collective memory. Mystic Muscles understands itself as an allegory of those invisible forces that transform artistic ideas into sensually experiential forms, while simultaneously referring to the mythologically evocative beings created by Kohlmann – so-called non-humans. These too stand for spirits, for the intangible and the hidden: for energies, stories, memories, and states that elude rational explanation yet remain effective.