„My Body is a Battlefield“ offers a comprehensive insight into the work of the Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, born in Crimea in 1988. Already in her early works, she deals with patriarchal structures and the absence of female subjectivity in Ukrainian art. With the annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war, questions of identity and belonging and the themes of border and violence become a leitmotif of her artistic practice. Kulikovska's sculptures - casts made of unusual materials such as ballistic soap, fat, epoxy resin - are exact copies of her body or individual body parts. They are subject to processes of ageing and decay, are modified, transformed and deconstructed. In her series of watercolours and drawings - on medical reports and official forms, for example - she designs bodies that defy the markings and boundaries of the paper as much as the bureaucratic constraints and gender fixations formulated there. Her ceramics - casts of severed limbs and replicas of bodily fluids - give expression to her rage and despair in the face of the brutality and horrors of war. Kulikovska shows her body as a site of conflicting emotions and traumatic memories and as a contested arena of ideological attributions and warlike aggression. Her works are acts of self-assertion and rebellion against gender and sexual norms as well as forms of violent subjugation. The illustrated book - the artist's first monograph in German - was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the artist's first solo exhibition in the German-speaking world.weiterlesen