“In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.”
(T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

The exotic is always just around the corner, no matter where you are. And in the city sky, you won’t see even the brightest stars. But if you look closely in winter, six alpha stars from different constellations outline a circle around the Milky Way. Through this frame, the series of photographs that Iwajla Klinke presents at Borderline Art Space becomes visible.

Pearls, transparent materials, shimmering precious fabrics, tinsel, plastic, stitches, colorful threads, myrrh, incense, epaulets, emperors and kings, the materiality of the baroque prefigured by El Greco, the early chiaroscuro of the Renaissance—here is an artist who dares to dissect masculinity at its freshest. Like the hunt of still life, like anatomy in study, like vanitas.

The characters captured by Iwajla Klinke are at moments of transformation, but not in the intimacy of personal space, where adolescence hatches unseen, but in situations of public solemnity, in the midst of the community, in the midst of a ritual. Through her own artistic ritual, Klinke stages the aesthetics of studio painting, then captures the subjects always on location and succeeds in softening natural light with the darkness of a backdrop. The studio photography atmosphere thus blends early 20th-century practices with the technical refinement of fashion photography, but also with that gaze of documentary portraiture.

‘A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after,’ says Jeff Wall. Just as a lightning strike creates a pearl within a shell. Just as winter freezes nature in a time-frame that is not man-made, so too the images of this exhibition freeze the gaze between fascination, obsession, and contradiction.

Returning repeatedly to Romania over the past decade to witness winter customs in some cities, Iwajla Klinke has captured the phenomenon of the King Herod Procession, where young boys on the cusp of adolescence dress spectacularly and craft their own postmodern symbolism to then play characters from the nativity story of the Savior of the world. From here emerged a series of images seemingly out of this world, from an allegorical time where the context of the photos dissolves, locations are erased, ages and faces have no names, for the lens of the camera to imprint the immediate moment of entering the role, from that point in time between before and after. Before and after the photograph, before and after maturity.

The Winter Hexagon exhibition breathes an instinctive parade spirit, similar to the 1970s David Bowie, who redefined the boundaries of masculinity with his iconic costumes. It offers more than the glamour of effervescent boys in androgynous postures. The small demonstration of Iwajla Klinke’s clean, bold, and distinguishable photographic style, projects a creative reinterpretation of portraiture. But it also lays out the poetic layers of the myth of transition (from one year to the next, from one age to another) as only the eyes of the other can see them, from the distance between genders, from the earth to the stars.
(Luminița Apostu Toma)

Iwajla Klinke (b. 1976) is a Berlin-based visual artist whose work explores cultural identity, historical memory, as well as gender and masculinity through photography and mixed media. With a background in art history, Jewish studies, and Islamic studies from FU Berlin, she has exhibited widely across Germany and internationally, including Berlin, Paris, Vienna, São Paulo, Toronto, and New York. Klinke’s upcoming retrospective The Nymphs are Departed at Diözesanmuseum München/Freising (March–August 2025) will feature nearly 40 large-scale works. Her most recent project Schöne Neue Welt was presented at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt (2024). Klinke is known for her evocative visual narratives and technical artistry.