Galerie Tanja Wagner presents the group exhibition The Seed Is the Tree Is the House featuring works by Šejla Kamerić, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Grit Richter, Cielo Saucedo, Anna Steinert and Angelika J. Trojnarski. 

Western culture has long relied on the notion that the world is made up of fixed, enduring substances. Matter is stable, its contours conveniently discrete, so that it can be measured, tested, and proven. This worked like a spell, one that cast the West’s hegemony over the rest of the world, enabling extraordinary scientific achievement as well as immense ecological destruction.

The title The Seed Is the Tree Is the House is a provocative statement, a challenge to this classical ontology, but also an invitation to reconsider the received notion of nature and culture as a binary. The artists of the exhibition are inspired by theories coming from ecology, cybernetics, feminism, post-humanism and non-Western philosophies that emphasise the transient processes undergirding existence. Attuned to the circuits and feedback loops, either mechanical, biological, or social, that unite us with all living and non-living things on Earth, the exhibition grows out of a sense of the world as fluid and networked.


Šejla Kamerić‘s Arma Rosa III belongs to a series of brass sculptures depicting tall, thorny branches. The sculptures were first presented alongside Thorn (Bitch), a series of close-up polaroids of the artist’s body interacting with real thorny branches laid firmly against the bare skin of her thighs. The photographs are self-portraits, a practice that recurs throughout Kamerić’s oeuvre. Like many feminists before her, she uses her own body as a tool for critique. Situated and corporeal, her critique stands against the clinical detachment that grounds claims to objectivity and universalism. Arma Rosa III‘s Y-shape echoes the fork of the thighs depicted throughout this series and elsewhere in the artist’s practice. Notably, it also refers to the ubiquity of this trope within the canon of Western art. Thorns, as well as the flowers to which they belong, occupy a significant place within the Western symbolic imaginary: the flower graceful and velvety, the thorn its sharp, dangerous underside. For Kamerić, thorns also point to the pain, embedded in everyday female life, that has been historically overlooked and dismissed.

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s textile installation is called Interfaces_Entretelas. The work’s title carries a double meaning. On one hand, it echoes the concept of haciendo caras, a form of political defiance put forward by Chicana theorist and author Gloria Anzaldúa. On the other hand, it refers to the very material used in the piece: entretela (interlining), a type of fabric placed between a garment’s outer and inner layers to shape, support, and protect the body. For Melgarejo Weinandt, who is Bolivian-German, entretela becomes a figure for her own experience of in-betweenness, of feeling at home across different languages, traditions, and geographies, while belonging fully to none. This in-betweenness finds a name in Nepantla, the Aztec term for the space ‘in the middle,’ which Anzaldúa adopts to describe the threshold regions between different spheres of existence. Nepantla resonates with a broader current in Aztec metaphysics, which foregrounds process over stable substance. The universe is understood as in flux, in a state of constant becoming. Melgarejo Weinandt treats textile as a structure capable of holding meaning and memory. In this sense, her work relates to the traditional role of textile in Andean cultures as a form of writing and record-keeping.

Grit Richter’s process begins within the rigid vastness of the digital grid. Here a sketch emerges. Her next move is both meticulous and deeply embodied. First, she thoroughly primes the canvas, multiple times. Applying oil paint with uncanny precision, she then painstakingly translates her digital drawing onto the canvas. The resulting paintings are hypnotic, incandescent. The grid is not just a backdrop but an integral element of Richter’s visual world, sometimes becoming the central object of her canvases. Sometimes this grid is inhabited by buoyant, rounded figures; other times by tubes or cable-like figures that echo the lines forming the grid. At other times, these cylindrical objects are punctuated by tiny hands. Her visual imaginary finds affinities simultaneously with the atomic, the digital, and the cosmic. But this universe is not cold, as it might sound; on the contrary, at the heart of her work is always connection. Hands, and the pointed finger in particular, are among the few figurative elements in her symbolic universe, serving as tools for touching, creating, and connecting.

Cielo Saucedo’s Sword of Damocles (NOTHING POWER) (disarmed) belongs to her Masticado series, meaning chewed up or digested in Spanish. It is a 3D scan of the artist’s body, migrated back into the physical through a 3D printing process. For this, the artist hacked 3D printers to use a mixture of Maseca (a brand of powdered corn masa flour) fortified with clay, self-tanner, antipsychotic medication, and paper pulp. The series is centered on research around post-NAFTA economic policy that turned Mexico’s biggest export from corn into labor, as well as the border policy that controls the movement of said labor through increasingly virtual means. The material performs itself: obscuring and cracking the body, rotting, being eaten; its hybrid, natural material remains unable to be wholly shaped by technological means. Saucedo’s practice is critically engaged with borders of different kinds, be it national borders or the separations between natural and unnatural, material and virtual, human and non-human, with the goal of demonstrating how these separations are dependent on one another and operate in service of their own construction.

Anna Steinert‘s paintings, sculptures, and masks speak to a profound understanding of the affective power of colour to conjure feelings and actions. Canvas, oil paint, and pastels are mobilised in an intuitive and visceral procedure, her actions a function of the colours and textures applied to the canvas. This incantatory impulse extends to her masks and sculptural ‘creatures’, which ambivalently recall objects in the natural world. With their fantastical allusions, these objects point to the enchanting, chimeric potential of images themselves, and thereby gesture toward the role of fantasy in everyday life. Her compositions and titles are informed by her many theoretical interests, which range from Donna Haraway’s feminist speculative fabulation to Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Through her performances and video works, the significance of embodiment and the social and communal in her practice is brought to bear.


Angelika J. Trojnarski’s practice stems from a fascination with nature’s boundless beauty, as well as humanity’s innate motivation to understand its complex processes. Her works are inseparable from her regular expeditions to glaciers, deserts, mountains, and forests, which serve as embodied reminders of a single human’s smallness against the scale of nature’s sublime. Across a number of disciplines, Trojnarski takes inspiration from natural processes such as rain, mist, or fire, sometimes involving these processes explicitly in her compositions. In her new work, Spirit of the Forest, the exposed canvas is as important to the composition as each stroke of the paintbrush. Each element seems to be balanced against the others, considered equally, engaged in a circular, multidirectional relation. Airy and light, the composition suggests transience where one might usually expect rootedness, pointing to the tree as process, as always becoming.